
. -BTf/af 



Glass 



Book, ' 



PRESENTED Wf 



CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

PROVIDENCE AND FAITH 

WHERE SCIENCE AND RELIGION MEET 

Essays on "Creation and Providence" and 

"Atonement" in 
FAITH AND FREEDOM 



CHRISTIANITY AND 
CHRIST 



BY 

WILLIAM SCOTT PALMER 



■mA-wv, ^ «^h-5 



" He goeth back that continueth not." 



NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 






PREFATORY NOTE 

TWELVE years ago I was profoundly in- 
fluenced by the critical examination of 
Christian documents and of Christian origins, 
by science generally and by the new movement 
in philosophy. I felt impelled to revise my 
religious beliefs. It was a kind of stocktaking, 
and took the form of a diary, now long out of 
print. 

Many trials have come upon the Christian 
religion and the Church since then. It seems 
to be time for a new stocktaking on my part ; 
and I propose to write a new diary and in it ask 
my new questions and find, perhaps, new 
answers. If I use the old one to confirm or 
illustrate this, I hope I shall be forgiven by any 
readers who chance to recognize quotations from 
it. I shall use them only when I am sure of their 
being both appropriate and significant in the 
new context. 

W. S. P. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Prefatory Note 






PAGE 
V 


^-Studies in Christ Jesus . 






1 


Personality, Divine and Human 






4 


God Manifest in the Flesh 






10 


The Magic of the Lord . 






16 


The Religious Tradition . 






18 


The Virgin Birth 






29 


The Coming of Christ 






36 


St. John 






40 


Inspiration .... 






. 45 


The Christ of St. John 






. 49 


The Expectation of the Kingdom 






. 52 


The Good News 






59 


The Ascent of Life 






65 


The Approach to God 






. 71 


The New Genesis 






75 


The New Biology 






. 81 


The Advance of God 






86 


The Fecundity of Life 






. 90 


Miracle 






93 


The Psychological Assault 






. 103 


False Gods 






110 


Divine Joy .... 






117 


Omnipotence . . . 






121 



Vlll 



TABLE OF COX TEXTS 



The Symbolism of the Cross 

The Glory of Easter 

Persephone anb Christ 

Community 

The Symbol of God . 

Co^biunion 

The Fellowship of Science 

Experience and Interpretation 

Discovery and Revelation 

The Kingdom of Heaven . 

Christ, the World's Way . 

The Promise of the Church 

The Coming Kingdom 

Finding Christ . 

The Supreme Person 

Conclusion 



PAGB 

129 



138 
143 

146 
147 
154 
160 
165 
170 
173 
177 
1S7 
192 
199 
203 



CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

December 5th. — I have been reading two books, 
The Jesus of History and By an Unknown Dis- 
ciple ; I have tried and failed to read again 
Seeley's Ecce Homo; and I have read the 
Fourth Gospel with my mind looking to the 
contrast with it that those other two present. 
Dr. Glover, no doubt, has in reserve his picture 
of the Christ Jesus given in that Gospel ; but 
the creator of the Unknown Disciple, like many 
religious people who are not Christians yet live 
where Christians are, is blind to St. John's Christ 
Jesus, to the Eternal Christ he shows. It is a 
blindness easy to account for, and I have not 
the slightest doubt of its being due to the fault 
of Christians. If they had learnt as they might 
have learnt from St. John (let us continue to 
call that unnamed mystic and philosopher St. 
John) they could not have perverted the faith 
of Christ into a rationalized, mechanized, theolo- 
gized scheme of a man who was no man and a 
God masquerading as man. 

These are strong words, and emotion has a 
good deal to do with them. I am indignant 



2 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

where I should be calmly sympathetic. We 
who are Christians are most of us only plain men 
even when we are scholars and theologians. We 
have learnt in an all too plain school to use 
words and think thoughts as we use mechanical 
tools. Our reasoning is too often desperately 
mechanical ; spirit and life both baffle it. We 
are like the Jews — " How can these things be ? " 
So we picture the anointed Son of Man, the great 
presentment of the eternal Christ of God, in 
some poor sort of way or another that shall 
make him easy for us to " understand/' We 
" understand " him when we have made a 
machine-like model of him. They did that in a 
very neat and accurate-looking way, the best 
way possible at the time, at Chalcedon. They 
said to themselves (and truly) that he was God 
and Man. " How can these things be ? " They 
made a model, and, as psychological science was 
not yet born, it was made quite simply a thing 
model. As a person (they had a better word for 
the purpose than our " person ") he was God ; 
but he had two natures, divine and human, and 
two wills, divine and human, united by his 
divine " person/' as we have to say. There we 
have our model, plain enough, in a fashion that 
would suit stones or parts of a machine ; but it 
does not suit God and man, now that we know 



STUDIES IN CHRIST JESUS 3 

more of man. The science of mind has certainly- 
done us the good service of showing us the latent 
materialism of such work as this. 

Popularly, Christ Jesus is only God in mas- 
querade, which is an easy conception, popularly. 
Therefore revulsion came. And we have among 
many other signs of it these two books, both 
beautiful, both arrestingly true in their different 
ways, giving us pictures of a true man, a man as 
he should be, up to a point. Beyond that point 
there is the complementary picture in the 
Fourth Gospel of a man in whom the Word of 
God is fully manifest, a man whose manhood is 
taken into God and permeated by God, one who 
shows us both man as he should be when he has 
passed that arresting point, and God as he is 
for man. That, too, not in a mechanistic model, 
but as very Life — the Eternal Christ in whom 
abides very Light and very Love. " How can 
these things be ? " 

Words are too poor, logic fails us, before the 
mystery of growing union between man and 
God, the mutual permeation and inherence of 
the human and the divine towards which and in 
which our nature strains. It is well to study the 
living fact. That may be seen and watched not 
only in the great Son, but in us who are his 
brethren. Jacob Boehme says that the cross 



4 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

we must all take up and bear, if we would follow 
Jesus, is the cross of our unfulfilled nature. 
There we can see what the cross in the heart 
of God is, which he bears until we are fulfilled 
in him. 

Mystery, yes; but a mystery that is spirit 
and life within ourselves. In our spirit and life 
the mystery is in part unveiled ; for God in us, 
the Spirit of God indwelling us and becoming 
ourselves, is known in men's experience, where 
they do not shut him out. We must look into' 
ourselves, and learn of our mystery. We must 
learn what it is to be as we are and stand where 
we stand, persons capable of meeting persons 
in the vital interpenetrating way, and having 
personal relations of mind and spirit that are 
very different from the relations between stones 
or plants, or even our most friendly beasts. 



December 6th. — Bergson, whom even pursuit 
by fashion cannot stultify, made a striking 
declaration about the religious outcome of his 
three great books, which both his critics and his 
followers often forget. (I take the English 
rendering given in Henri Bergson, by Ruhe and 
Paul.) " Now the considerations set forth in 



PERSONALITY, DIVINE AND HUMAN 5 

my Essai sur les donnees immediates result in 
bringing to light the fact of freedom ; those of 
Matiere et Memoire point directly, I hope, to the 
reality of spirit ; those of U Evolution creatrice 
exhibit Creation as a fact. From all this 
emerges clearly the idea of a God, Creator and 
free, the generator of both matter and life, 
whose work of creation is continued on the side 
of life by the evolution of species and the build- 
ing up of human personalities. From all this 
emerges, consequently, a refutation of monism 
and pantheism in general." 

He has a reputation to lose, this philosopher ; 
and he marks for us a change in thought. It is 
possible now to confess the reality of spirit as 
candidly as we confess the reality of matter, 
and without apologies. Spirit has always been 
avowedly mysterious ; matter, on the other 
hand, was supposed once to have no mystery 
about it. Now even the electrotonic theory of 
it reeks of mystery. What in the name of 
common sense are these electrons ? They are 
not matter ; yet matter is composed of them. 

I look forward to a day (not far off, as I think) 
when matter will have come so near to spirit as 
to have lost all easy interpretation, even by the 
short-sighted men we call materialists. Spirit 
may then come into its own even for them, as 



6 CHRISTIANITY AXD CHRIST 

more real (I bear in mind Bradley's degrees of 
reality) and yet no more mysterious than matter. 

As to God, Creator and free, and as to a crea- 
tion crowned in personal life, an acknowledg- 
ment like this of Bergson's brings philosophic 
thought very near our Christian religion. Indeed 
we may well ask ourselves whether that thought 
is not carried further on its own congenial way, 
if it is taken to the very threshold of religion, 
which perhaps may lead to its completing by 
religion. 

After all, if there is a God and if he has 
brought persons into being, there must be links 
between him and them. What are those links ? 
And how far do they go ? Do they stop short 
in some relation like that of an ingenious in- 
ventor with a set of puppets he has made for a 
puppet-show ? Is that the relation we expect 
to find between God. Creator and free, and the 
personal beings who crown a world in which his 
potency, through millions of years of striving, 
has reached their e min ence ? I could not respect 
a God who fabricated at such cost and pains a 
puppet-show ; I cannot respect any theory of 
him that makes him so ridiculous. 

Besides, what is any person in relation to 
another person, as we know persons ? What, in 
short, am I in my relation to any other person ? 



PERSONALITY, DIVINE AND HUMAN 7 

The odd thing, the striking thing, about our 
relation is that under certain circumstances it 
will enable him to give himself to me and me to 
give myself to him, in an harmonious interplay 
of conscious or unconscious give and take. As 
he and 1 are not machines, our knowing and 
feeling and acting are not produced like flour 
out of a flour-mill ; they are our own selves, and 
when we show them, we show ourselves, when 
we communicate them, we communicate our- 
selves. We may not choose to share our know- 
ing with each other, and the state of our minds 
and hearts ; but if we do choose, we can. If we 
choose, he and I may in some degree become 
identical in aim and thought and feeling, and we 
may work together in real cooperation. But we 
cannot be forced into this harmony. If we do 
not choose to give ourselves, to communicate 
ourselves, no power in earth or heaven can make 
us. There is nothing necessary or compulsive 
about it. 

So, when I hear that the striving of life has 
been directed towards emancipating live crea- 
tures from the bonds of material necessity, I do 
well to think of this natural everyday experi- 
ence of ourselves. We need not give ourselves ; 
we often don't ; but we can. It is a great pre- 
rogative ; and we may usefully take note of it 



8 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

as a sign of our being persons and not play- 
things. 

Very well. Then consider God, who, having 
brought into being persons, may reasonably be 
regarded as not less than personal, however much 
more, or infinitely more, he may be. Lotze says 
that perfect personality is in him only, and that 
we are only " pale copies." This, I suppose, 
means that Lotze observes our imperfection as 
persons. We are imperfectly personal as we are 
imperfectly free ; we are probably very far from 
being finished. Personality in us seems a mere 
germ, though a germ of wonderful promise, like 
the promise of our imperfect freedom. But we 
are enabled by it to tell ourselves that if, when 
we choose, we can admit a fellow-creature into 
the surprising intimacy of a harmony in know- 
ledge, in purpose and intention, in mind gener- 
ally and in heart, we can in some measure admit 
into a like intimacy God, if he is willing to com- 
municate himself to us. We may even go so far 
as to say that, whereas the imperfection of a 
fellow-creature (like our own imperfection) 
hinders harmony and mutual giving between 
him and us, the perfection of the personality in 
God, even if he is infinitely greater than personal, 
must further it. And we, as we learn to do his 
will, may come to hinder him less. 



PERSONALITY, DIVINE AND HUMAN 9 

I am afraid we do not often think out these 
things. They may seem " theoretical " ; I am 
sure they are not, that is, in the invidious sense 
of being useless. I am afraid too that we do not 
apply the lessons of our experience of each other 
to our relation with God ; chiefly, no doubt, 
because our experience is not often of a character 
to point to God. We so rarely experience " the 
soul-enlarging mystery of the awakening of our 
mind and will to fuller life and fruitfulness " in 
human intercourse. Our experience of men so 
rarely shows what it might of the self-com- 
municating life-giving intercourse of soul with 
soul ; it is so often an affair of soul over against 
soul, and mind opposing mind. How should 
such experience enlighten us concerning God ? 
How should it not darken our counsel about 
him, as well as our vision of him and our inter- 
course with him ? How, in fact, can a man love 
God unless he loves his brother also ? That is, 
how can a man touch, taste and enjoy God (as 
the mystics say) unless he touches, tastes and 
enjoys, so far as may be, his fellow-men ? They 
are the school of personal intercourse in which 
he may be trained for God. If he and his fellow- 
men are growing, even only growing and that 
very slowly, into the harmony of personal self- 
communicating life which St. John pictures as 



io CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

oneness among men such as is enjoyed by the 
Father and his divine Son, then God and they 
will be growing into that oneness too. ' What 
life woukTst thou lead ? " Traherne asks. 
" WoukTst thou serve God alone ? God alone 
cannot be beloved. ... He must be loved in all 
with an unlimited love, even in all His doings, 
in all His friends, in all His creatures. Every- 
where in all things thou must meet His love . And 
this the Law of Nature commands. And it is 
thy glory that thou art fitted for it. . . . Thy 
nature urgeth it. For without loving thou art 
desolate, and by loving thou enjoyest. Yea, by 
loving thou expandest and enlargest thyself, and 
the more thou lovest, art the more glorious. . . . 
Which showeth the endless proneness of love to 
increase and never to decay. my Soul, thou 
livest in all those whom thou lovest : and in 
them enjoyest all their treasures." 



December 8th. — If God were to find his way 
into such a degree of intimacy with any man 
among us as would mean an identity of purpose 
and knowledge, of mind and heart, like that of 
lover and lover, or of an exalted friendship in 
generous cooperation, he would in some degree 



GOD MANIFEST IN THE FLESH n 

have communicated himself as personal to the 
man as personal. There would be a degree of 
harmony and of real identity of aim, purpose, 
knowledge, love, between God and the man. 
The personality of the man would be happily 
invaded by God, whom he would willingly 
receive and make his own. God would 4 be ex- 
pressed by the man, so far as that man's manhood 
and desire then allowed. The man would not 
be destroyed or replaced, he would be in some 
degree fulfilled ; God would not be essentially 
misrepresented, he would be truly if partially 
represented in terms of the man whom in part 
he had permeated by his spirit. 

There is, I suppose, no grimmer skeleton in 
many people's theological cupboard than the 
problem of the place of one particular historical 
event in relation to the enduring truth of spirit 
and life — the place of Jesus of Nazareth in rela- 
tion to the Christ of all humanity in heaven and 
on earth. Born in a little place, of a little nation, 
at a given date, " born of a woman/' the " only- 
begotten Son of God," we say, came once to this 
little planet and walked about it a man among 
men. He had a childhood, he grew to maturity, 
he found a way to death ; and death dealt 
with him as it deals with us. Men tell us 



12 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

that it is incredible. Can we maintain that it 
is true ? 

" Now are we the sons of God/' we say, we 
ordinary men. The only begotten is our Elder 
Brother, and we are fellow-heirs with him, God 
though he be ; we too in the Spirit are begotten, 
though in the flesh we are made. Is there a con- 
tradiction here ? Or do we speak better than 
we know, from depths unreached by logic, 
depths of the spirit which has only permitted 
logic and will some day keep it in its place ? 

" Sons " — what do we mean, what are we 
struggling to say, when we speak of ordinary 
men as Sons of God, and yet confess one man 
as the only begotten, the royally Anointed ? 
Words of analogical reasoning, these are ; 
symbols, too, thrown out as nets to entangle 
for a moment an immensity that eludes all 
effort to detain it. They are words appropriate 
only to a kinship that has visible beginning, to 
kindred linked in space, father juxtaposed by 
son, son following father. 

Our kinship with God is of another order, 
because he transcends all orders. But we 
Christians should know the deep kinship of per- 
sonal spirits, their permeation of each other by 
mutual love and an intuitive understanding in 
which each interweaves his own mystery with 



GOD MANIFEST IN THE FLESH 13 

the mystery of the other ; and in this we should 
have some clue to our relation with God and be 
able to speak intelligently about it. Holding 
this clue, we learn that what we call Sonship in 
God must mean the capacity of receiving him 
into ourselves in personal union. We begin to 
see that we may know him as a divine will and 
character becoming our own human will and 
character. So God may both become visible in 
a man, and enable him to express the proper 
perfection of a man. All that is needed is that 
the way be clear of barriers set against his 
coming. The man then enters into personal 
possession of God as he enters into possession 
of himself in the fulfilment of that which he has 
in him to become. This, for Christians, is man's 
far-off goal. But it is an intelligible goal. We can 
maintain that it has value and pertinence in life. 
Even now, even here and now, there are 
moments when God makes himself known to men, 
overcoming the poverty of those who entertain 
him. They are begotten anew in a little part of 
their unordered complexity of life. They are 
born again of the spirit of love that orders all 
things. But not wholly, for still they resist him, 
still he must strive with them ; they are not 
conquered. Yet, clearly, if any man never op- 
posed God, if he were always permeable to the 



14 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

divine influx, he would indeed be manifestly 
God's Son, wholly his, living in his life, making 
him fully known in terms of man, as a man 
among men. The manifestation of God in the 
man would and must be local, temporary, in a 
place and at a stated time ; God would be, as 
always, infinitely beyond it ; but he would be 
really present there, he would be revealed in the 
man according to the measure of man. And 
that would be the emergence from the con- 
tinuity of a living process of a supreme order of 
life ; it would show the difference between the 
unbroken whole of a proper human perfection 
and the more or less of imperfection in other men. 
There God would make plain at last the way, 
the truth, and the life of man. There God, 
embracing finitude and growing in wisdom and 
stature, would become at last " manifest in the 
flesh "asa man whose kingdom should have no 
end. He would come among us seeking his own 
as man seeks man ; endowed with the narrow 
but penetrating advantage of bodily approach, 
and a halting yet intelligible speech for the 
eternal Love and Reason. So he, the God ever 
striving in each one of us, knocking always at 
the door of every heart, would also draw near 
to us from without in a visible, intelligible 
sacrament, and by love eloquent in the actual 



GOD MANIFEST IN THE FLESH 15 

life of one man. In that sacrament, by a life of 
power brought to the door of sense, the secret 
of all hearts would be presented to all eyes and 
told in every tongue. 

Has it ever been so ? Was it indeed so in 
Palestine, a bare two thousand years ago, as 
Christians say ? Is there evidence, witness in 
the life of men, in the life of Christian men ? 

This wonder is not to be known by any mere 
teaching — " The teaching leads to the pathway 
and to the journey. The vision is the affair of 
him who would see." It is a wonder the world 
has always desired and often foretold ; it fills 
the longing soul with good things that imagina- 
tion, in many a mythical shape, has depicted ; 
but it must be seen to be believed. For there is 
a secret that hides these things from " the wise 
and prudent," who wish to see with intellectual 
eyes unfitted for such vision, before they make 
the venture of the heart which alone discovers 
it. It is a secret revealed to the babes who do 
not know how to blind their spirit's eyes, or 
check the impulse of the heart. Treasures of 
spirit and life cannot be grasped like truths of 
science ; they must be received as indwelling 
power, lived and loved that they may be known. 
Only when Christ dwells in us do we know him ; 
and then we know him as our life and the will 



16 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

and love of God in us. " God has sprung up for 
us, out of the earth as it seems ; yes, from the 
very heart of humanity." 

Can we indeed make this living truth intelli- 
gible and not only intelligible but welcome, 
desired, sought after as men seek after treasure 
of the heart when the heart knows its treasure ? 



December 10th. — A man must live the life to 
know of the doctrine of the incarnate Word. 
But the Lord Jesus has his own magic and draws 
men by it. You will hear a hundred, a thou- 
sand, objections to God for one brought against 
him. You will hear him over and over again 
contrasted with God in God's disfavour. The 
beauty of his self-sacrificing life in Palestine, his 
piercing knowledge of men and his infinite com- 
passion for them, his wisdom and the enduring 
if unattainable standard of conduct he set up ; 
and finally that personal magic which across the 
centuries the Gospel portraits of him still exert 
—all these make him attractive to men as no 
other man has ever been. You have only to 
read The Jesus of History to see how that must 
be. And in the other presentment, which is all 
but history, By an Unknown Disciple, you will 



THE MAGIC OF THE LORD 17 

see the same thing. There are many followers 
of Jesus who are doing his will and learning, no 
doubt, of his doctrine, because, so they say, 
they love him and admire him as " only a man." 
" Only a man " betrays them doubly, for what 
is a man unless he is capable of God ? Besides, 
they mean too that Christ Jesus is of no higher 
order than they themselves, and differs from them 
only in degree as being better, more courageous, 
stronger, finer, more gracious and lovable. We 
cannot blame them for this, because until they 
see every man who really is a man as capable of 
God, yet often rejecting him, they cannot see 
how one who is filled with the fullness of God is 
of a supreme, an unique, order in the hierarchy 
of life. They cannot see, either, the greatness 
to which they themselves are summoned by 
their capacity for God. 

Yet we all live by admiration and desire, and 
God comes to any who admire and will receive 
that which he is, truth, beauty, justice, love. 
Even if it is not a beauty in Jesus, or truth seen 
in him ; even if we admire these only as ideals, 
apart from their realization in him or in any man 
who has ever walked the earth, if we earnestly 
seek after them because they are what they are, 
and in the true sense worship them, then we 
assuredly find God and are held fast by him. 



18 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

It is not necessary that we should be able to 
know and recognize consciously just what we 
are doing in him or he is doing in us ; we may be 
of those who in great surprise will say " Lord, 
we never knew thee " ; — but he knows us, and 
our hearts will recognize where our knowledge 

failed to reach. 

" When hast thou said 
That only those who see, shall taste the living bread ? " 

If I watch any man attracted by Jesus as 
" only a man/' I smile to myself ; it is the 
attraction that counts, not the mistake. Heaven 
knows that when we reach some world of clearer 
light than this we shall find that in trying to 
express spirit and life in our poor thought and 
poorer language we have made mistakes quite 
bad enough to set beside any such as this, 
perhaps much worse. 



December 16th. — We who call ourselves Chris- 
tians of the Church have a mass of tradition 
that we believe to be worthy of high respect. 
We pass it by at our peril, proving ourselves not 
only half-hearted in allegiance or at least half- 
minded, but ignorant of the value and the claim 
of an experience far wider and far longer than 



THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION 19 

our own, which tradition may possibly embody. 
Nowadays, if we see the peril of the Church, we 
dare not pass it by. Great fault is being found 
with our traditions and with the use of them 
both by our official representatives in the Church 
and by us whom they represent. We are told, 
and we deserve to be told, that we accept them 
without examining them ; and that we do not 
distinguish between the real experience of reli- 
gious and spiritual truth and a loyal or idle 
acceptance of interpretations or of supposed 
facts only forced upon us or commended to us. 
People are everywhere saying this about us, and 
I don't wonder at them. We have certainly 
earned the reproach. It is full time for us to 
mend our ways. 

For my part I have seen this for long. Circum- 
stances within me and without have driven me 
to work towards a better understanding of our 
position and of the charges brought against us 
by our many and increasing opponents. I have 
tried to study the Christian tradition, to look at 
it from their side as well as from ours, to dis- 
tinguish between that actual experience of our 
fellow-Christians which gives weight to the 
traditional consensus, and the mere assent to 
statements regarding facts or interpretations, 
by whatever authority they have been made or 



zc CHRIST I AX ITT JXD CHRIST 

through whatever influence they have been com- 
mended, which were not. are not. and cannot be 

vers of experience at all to those who have 
accepted them. I recognize the great value of this 
distinction ; I have found and proved its value. 
" It is only the perfectly spontaneous agreement 
of spirit with spirit that lends value to a con- 
sensus. If it is the result of listlessness. or of 
imitativeness. or of governmental pressure, or 
of the fear of eternal damnation, it is worthless/'' 
I have tried to see fairly the traditional state- 
ments about facts of history, such as those con- 
cerning the infancy of Christ Jesus, sometimes 
as though I were an early Christian, sometimes 
as I am now with much of intermediate living 
and " theologizing " open to my research ; and 
I believe that I have karat, m this fashion, a 
meat deal that strengthens me in mv faith, 
nothing that weakens me. I shall take now 

q my old diary and embody her; pas- 

sages that are important to me. in which I 
described for myself mv attitude then towards 
the tradition of the birth of Jesus. They ai : 
correct in my eyes now as they were a dozen 
years ago. and they blend well with what I have 
to say to-day. Xo defence of the truth of the 
tradition th . \ been offered sine- that time 
has shaken me in the very least. On the contrary. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION 21 

the defensive work has, to my mind, only aided 
the attack — which, I remember, is what has 
usually happened when divines have taken the 
field against physical and biological science, and 
well may happen when they pit themselves 
against the sciences of history and psychology 
and of the criticism of documents. 

It is a good plan, I think, to carry oneself 
back in mind to the days and circumstances of 
the origin of a tradition and then try to follow 
its growth. I try to carry myself back into, say, 
the middle of the second century and then I ask 
myself what I should have thought of the newly 
recorded tradition of that time, if I had lived 
then and yet had my present prepossessions in 
science and philosophy. For instance, how should 
I have regarded the new matter added in the 
first and third Gospels to the earlier tradition 
(or in place of the earlier silence) concerning the 
birth and infancy of Christ ? I am inclined to 
say that I should have thought much of it forced, 
uncalled for. I should almost certainly not 
have thought it a gain in the expression of the 
truth as it is in Jesus, the truth of himself, his 
person and his office. I might even have re- 
gretted it, considered it rather a hindrance than 
a help to the acceptance of that truth. I should 
very likely have failed to appreciate its poetic 



22 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

truth and religious value. But I am sure that a 
different set of prepossessions would have brought 
me to a different ophiion. If I had been a child 
of my time and place and of the current know- 
ledge, I should have thought the new historical 
details and the inferences drawn from them con- 
firmed by my faith, and I should not have ques- 
tioned their truth of fact. I should probably 
have used them in an unconscious circle of argu- 
ment to defend my faith ; should have expected 
them at least to prepare a way for its reception 
by other men. 

At an earlier date, and as a Jew among Jews, 
I should have had at first no doubt that Jesus 
was the son of Joseph the carpenter ; I should 
have thought of him as his neighbours thought. 
I should have spoken of his family, of his 
brothers and sisters, of his father and his mother. 
When I had become his follower and learnt to 
believe in him as the Messianic Son of David, 
the genealogies given in the Gospels would have 
strengthened my belief. There, I would have 
said, is his descent in the royal line ; he is a 
king's son as well as a carpenter's ; God " shall 
give unto him the throne of his father David ; 
and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for 
ever/'' 

It is amazing to us now that those artificial 



THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION 23 

compilations could ever have carried conviction ; 
but the Hebrew Scriptures afford parallels 
enough to show that Hebrew criticism was not 
as ours. There are two genealogies of Benjamin, 
two of Judah, three of Caleb ; they troubled no 
one. Teaching, inferences, meanings, count for 
such minds to the obscuring of all scientific ques- 
tions as to fact ; they count in the same way for 
such minds now, if they have escaped the dis- 
cipline of criticism and the modern habit of 
fidelity to truth of fact. 

A little later, if I had been subject to new 
influences, I might have added with my own 
hand those significant words " as was supposed " 
with which St. Luke begins his tree of descent 
from Joseph to " Adam which was the Son of 
God." True to the manner of my age, I might 
not have noticed that I had made that tree 
fruitless of its former advantage, and had set a 
mark upon it that would tell the tale of its 
origin to more observant generations, like the 
account given of the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem, 
because it was the place that befitted a son of 
David. I should then have had a new purpose 
to serve and a new genealogical descent to prove, 
not from David. 

The divine Son needed no earthly father ; 
rather, he could have had none other than the 



24 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

Power of the Highest. And was there not a 
prophecy ? (I should have had no difficulty in 
reading " virgin " into that prophecy, where the 
text gave a different word. Literary fidelity was 
not of that age any more than scientific fidelity.) 
The tradition would thus grow with my growth, 
step by step, stage by stage — as it grew. In 
later generations it would naturally follow the 
same course — as it has. The result we see. 

But if in the early days, and still as a man of 
that time, I had been a follower of St. Paul, I 
should have been quite consistent with my 
teacher if I had cared for none of these things. 
The truth as it is in Jesus would have seemed 
independent of them ; as it does to me now. I 
might have written, like Paul, letters to the 
Churches of which he had care, and never so 
much as spoken of those affairs of descent and 
birth. Christ crucified, Christ risen from the 
dead, would have been enough of history for me, 
in whom Christ lived and proved himself life- 
giving, the heavenly and eternal Son, though 
manifest in the flesh and like ordinary men 
" born of a woman/'' I should have thought, 
probably, that any account of his being born of 
a virgin who was " found with child of the Holy 
Ghost " was likely to be incorrect, seeing that 
the heavenly Son existed before the world and 



THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION 25 

merely assumed the flesh. He had not arisen as 
something new when Mary became with child. 
u Entre la notion du logos preexistent qui 
s'incarne dans un homme, qui s 'impose une telle 
tache sachant et voulant ce qu'il fait, et la 
notion de la conception a jour fixe d'un etre 
nouveau n'acquerant une personnalite distincte 
qu au moment de son entree dans la vie humaine, 
il n'y a pas de commune mesure." 

Now, as I look back on the growth of the 
tradition, I see one set of prepossessions which 
worked towards determining, furthering, recon- 
ciling or ignoring this inconsistency, and finally 
consolidating it. And behind its persistence 
and its change I see along the later generations 
of Christians the constant influence of certain 
philosophical doctrines concerning matter, the 
impurity of nature, and the stain of sin and of 
its guilt upon the processes of nature. I see the 
increasing exaltation of virginity as a means of 
escape from the contamination of the flesh. I 
see a warmer welcome given to any means by 
which the imaginary heritage of the macula of 
sin could be cut off from our Lord. The sancti- 
fication of Mary from the moment of conception, 
by a special act of the Holy Ghost, was one 
means adopted to set that heritage still further 
back from Jesus ; and the tradition of the 



26 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

miraculous manner of his birth, passed over by 
St. Paul and in the second and fourth Gospels, 
and added in the first and third (with imperfect 
adjustment), found everywhere a welcome which 
was the more cordial and unquestioning because 
a virgin birth seemed the most fitting, as well as 
the accepted, means by which the Lord could 
escape the stigma set upon all sons of sinful man. 
How (Christians have said during these long years 
and until lately with more and more emphasis) 
shall the second Adam be pure, let his life be as 
it may, if the first Adam have indeed set that 
seal of guilt upon him ? Their prepossessions 
demanded a break in the succession ; and they 
found what they sought, or made it. 

Therefore they never found what good critics 
by their disinterested carefulness are showing us 
now in these documents of ours. They never 
found the sequence of ideas and notions as they 
grew round about experience and the fitting of 
interpretation to desire in regard to these 
matters. We are like our fathers ; but we are 
learning now a lesson they could not learn. We 
are learning the value of disinterestedness in 
criticism. It is a lesson taught us by new science 
and new methods. Men could not learn it 
before. The care of St. Luke was not as ours 
may be now ; it was only care in such a manner 



THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION 27 

and by such methods as were less carefully used 
by other and less careful men of his time. He 
had not reached " that stage of veneration for 
fact at which a historian accepts on evidence a 
tale which conflicts with cherished beliefs and 
rejects for want of evidence a tale which has an 
acceptable moral." He considered little enough 
the agreement of account with fact or of one 
fact with another ; edification stood with him 
above all ; the spirit ruled, sometimes mis- 
ruled, the letter. His attention was guided by 
penetrating insight into what really mattered 
for his purpose. Now truth of fact seems to be 
all that matters for us. And there are times when 
we miss the spirit in an idolatry of fact. We 
need to learn from men like St. Luke as well as 
from the stricter historians of our own times. 

So, I think, do those who find fault with an 
uncritical acceptance, and miss altogether the 
religious value in St. Luke's beautiful legend of 
the birth of Jesus — the truly religious value 
both his and St. Matthew's had for Christians in 
past days, and still have, whether taken as 
accounts of historic fact or not. For us who see 
them as religious poetry of different poetic ranks, 
they have the same religious value. " Poetry is 
a more philosophic thing than history and of a 
higher seriousness." We can see in the poetry 



28 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

of St. Luke the high seriousness of religious fact ; 
and, indeed, because his poetry exceeds St. 
Matthew's, so does his value for us. What does 
it matter to us that the Magnificat has its setting 
in poetic legend, once we have seen its depths 
of penetration into eternal truth and religious 
experience ? 

Let us tell those men who have not been able 
to acquire historic truth without losing truth of 
spirit and life, of poetry and religion, how wrong 
we have been in our uncritical days and how 
right they are, that they may come to see how 
right we are and how wrong they have been. 
Let us remind both them and ourselves, too, 
that, as William James says in words I try never 
to forget, " a rule of thinking which would 
absolutely prevent me from acknowledging cer- 
tain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were 
really there, would be an irrational rule." Every 
man of us needs that lesson, and not least those 
who do not acknowledge Christian kinds of 
truth. 

Dr. Percy Gardner says that the legendary 
view of the birth of our Lord " is absolutely 
doomed by the progress of historical research." 
It is like " a spar," he goes on, " which has been 
riddled with shot, and the wisest as well as the 
most honest plan is to try to rid the ship of its 



THE VIRGIN BIRTH 29 

weight ? " He adds that " the tenet is not, either 
from the historical or the logical point of view, 
the basis of the worship of the divine Son, but 
rather of the worship of the Virgin Mother." 
This is doubtless true, and Christendom must 
face it ; but we may keep both the religious 
value of the historical fact and the poetic and 
mystical significance of the Blessed Mother of the 
Lord Christ, if we will. She remains his Mother ; 
and all the wonders of life upon earth may be 
seen as not only symbolized but summed up in 
the picture of those two. 

There is one other great consequence to be 
faced. Belief in an infallible Church must be- 
come the privilege of those who submit to an 
infallible Pope. There will be no place for in- 
fallibility except in Rome. And that brings 
other Christians into line with candid truth- 
seekers everywhere, and should bring these to 
know their fellowship with us. 



December 17th. — I find I have more to say 
about the Christian tradition of the birth of 
Christ Jesus, or rather I have valuable stuff to 
note down that is not mine and is out of most 
people's reach. 



30 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

An Italian review, II Rinnovamento, was 
published during the brief spring-time of Roman 
Catholic Modernism, when the movement was 
still guided by careful hands and before hope of 
reform through aid from the reigning powers of 
the Church had faded away. 

The Papal power is now the only autocracy 
left to represent a once widely approved and 
widely useful principle of government ; but, 
w T hen the Roman Catholic Modernists were appeal- 
ing to it, it seemed a good deal more securely 
autocratic and also more capable of reform 
than it seems now. We cannot now easily believe 
that a fashion of rule which all the rest of the 
world has abandoned can persist there un- 
changed, if it admits of reform at all in any im- 
portant matter. Its existence mus|> depend, we 
think, on the maintenance of an august im- 
mobility and a self -guarding isolation. As an 
autocracy it may continue to exist, as it grew 
up, under the shadow of the great name of 
Imperial Rome — not else. If it reforms, it must 
be changed out of all recognition. 

II Rinnovamento died, crushed by autocracy ; 
but I give here some extracts which I, at least, 
would not willingly let die with it. They are 
translated from the original Italian. 

" The earliest Gospel began with the preach- 



THE VIRGIN BIRTH 31 

ing of the Baptist, and with the baptism of 
Jesus. This baptism is referred to in Mark i. 1, 
as ( the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ ' ; 
in John xv. 27, where Jesus at the Last Supper 
says to His disciples — ' Ye also shall bear wit- 
ness because ye have been with me from the 
beginning ' ; in Acts i. 21, 22, where Peter pro- 
poses that the disciples should choose in the 
place of Judas one ' of these men who have 
companied with us all the time that the Lord 
Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from 
the baptism of John ' ; and in Acts x. 37, 38, 
and xiii. 24, 25, where Peter and Paul respec- 
tively refer to the same point of departure. 
Neither Mark nor Matthew, nor Luke (if we 
omit their prologues), nor St. Paul in his letters, 
nor the Johannine writers, ever allude to any 
event in the earthly life of Jesus before His 
baptism. . . . 

" There is still a very general impression that 
to abandon the precise historical reality of either 
of the beautiful stories in these prologues means 
the necessary abandonment of every other 
account in the Gospel — from the baptism of 
Jesus to His parabolic teaching, and His Agony 
and Death upon the Cross. - All or nothing/ 
But the student knows very well that it is not 
so ; since not only must the historical reality 



32 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

of these scenes of the public life and of the 
Passion be kept, but it cannot be kept on the 
basis of principles which will also preserve 
intact the narratives of the Infancy. The his- 
torian who should attempt to defend both series 
of narratives on valid principles would only end 
by destroying both. Nor will such discrimination 
take from the prologues all truth and validity. 
They can and must remain as pictures vaguely, 
spiritually true, like the details and combina- 
tions, which have no historical basis, in a fresco 
of Fra Angelico's. 

" Then there is the grave difficulty that a 
Christian and Catholic doctrine, that of the 
conception and virgin birth of Our Lord, seems 
to be menaced by such a treatment of the 
prologues. On this delicate point we can only 
offer the following considerations : 

" (1) The textual and historical proofs of this 
doctrine, understood in the ordinary physical 
sense, are certainly weak, and at times contrary 
to the doctrine itself. There is no trace of it in 
Mark, in the epistles of St. Paul, nor in the 
Johannine writings. In fact Mark contains 
passages which are extremely difficult to con- 
ciliate with the fact inculcated by the doctrine. 
And the earliest texts of Matthew's genealogy, 
as also the earliest elements in St. Luke's 



THE VIRGIN BIRTH 33 

narrative of the infancy, suppose a typically 
human conception and birth. So that if we 
will, or must, retain the doctrine as affirming a 
real physical fact, the documents force us to 
admit that the immediate companions of Jesus 
and St. Paul lived and died without apparently 
being aware of the fact itself ; and that among 
the redactors of the ' three synoptic gospels 
(between the years 68 and 95 a.d. about), the 
first, Mark, offers us only documents which 
assume the contrary, while the later two 
(Matthew and Luke) give us the earlier doctrine 
together with the later developments. 

" (2) The belief in the virgin birth of Our 
Lord and the faith in His divinity are certainly 
largely aided the one by the other ; and the 
first, in certain times among certain peoples, 
may also have been strictly necessary (and may 
for some time continue to be so) for the pre- 
servation of the last. But the two beliefs are 
not, objectively, in a necessary connexion. Our 
Lord might have been conceived and born 
miraculously and yet still be merely man ; Our 
Lord might be all that the doctrine of His 
divinity strives to express and yet be conceived 
and born, with regard to the merely physical 
details of the facts, in the same manner as any 
other entirely human man/' 



34 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

It is an open secret that the writer of these 
words, who signs them only " H," is a devout 
and learned Koman Catholic scholar, whom to 
know is to revere. I set them down here as a 
monument of fearless faith. Everywhere there 
are Christians who are afraid to face truth of 
history lest it drive out truth of religious faith. 
They are afraid to confess that God has chosen 
the weak things of the world to reveal himself ; 
that he has taken true man, natural man, up 
into himself in true personal union by a way 
other than that which has so long seemed in 
their eyes the one way seemly for him in his 
magnificence. So they say that when we accept 
the verdict of critical historians, and lift the veil 
that devotion has thrown over history, we are 
denying the incarnation of God in man. It is 
not true : we are rather affirming it with a new 
fullness and a new emphasis. For us there is 
nothing of man except his sin that is not taken 
up by God in our Lord Jesus Christ. All human 
heritage, all the common conditions of human 
life, are become his. Not only has the manner 
of our conscious life upon earth become God's, 
but our history to the remotest sources, our 
birth as well as our breeding, our links with all 
the life of our fathers before us, everything that 
is ours and ourselves. Thus the incarnation of 



THE VIRGIN BIRTH 35 

God becomes perfect in its wholeness. Jesus, 
:e born of a woman, born under the law/' is the 
bearer of all the generations of man and carries 
them to God. In him all processes of life are 
sanctified, made common to God and man in 
harmonious union. 

It is we who stain those processes, each of us 
for himself. We stamp them in ourselves with 
the mark of our personal guilt. But even we 
cannot convey guilt to nature. " Not that 
which goeth into a man " defiles him. Flesh and 
blood are incapable of conveying the guilt of 
personal evil, although each one of us can mar 
our nature by wilful sin, even transmit it 
injured and defaced — a worse condition than be- 
fore for the growth of spiritual life. The spirit 
of man and the natural process by which man 
is born are both capable of being raised into free 
relation with the life of God, as they are capable 
of being degraded in slavery to the lowest of 
man's natural needs. From God they came, 
even those natural needs ; and to him they may 
return, by the beloved Son in whom he is well 
pleased, in whom his power is complete. He 
makes in his own image that which we often mar 
in ours ; he makes again that which we have 
marred. And if the birth of our Saviour was as 
our own birth, he took from the beginning all 



36 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

that is ours, to carry it by the power of the life 
of God into the proper perfection of man. In 
him we see, too, that even man's highest order 
of life, his proper perfection, is always dependent 
for its endurance on his enduring conformity 
to the will of God. The interpenetration and 
identity of persons remain, even in the per- 
fection of the incarnate Christ, a matter of free 
acceptance and self-giving. So our Lord says 
to us that if we keep his commandments we shall 
" abide " in his love ; " even as I have kept my 
Father's commandments, and abide in his 
love." 



Christmas Day. — " A blue-black sky ablaze 
with stars for His glory, a fresh white robe for 
stained and tired earth ; so we went to Beth- 
lehem in the rare stillness of the early morning. 
The Church, having no stars, had lighted candles ; 
and we poor sinful men having no white robes of 
our own had craved them of the Great King at 
her hands. 

"And so in the stillness, with tapers within 
and stars alight without, with a white-clad 
earth, and souls forgiven, the Christ-Child came 
to those who looked for His appearing." 

" To those who looked." Ask and ye shall 



• THE COMING OF CHRIST 37 

receive ; seek and ye shall find ; knock and it shall 
be opened unto you. They call it expectant atten- 
tion nowadays — this attitude of those who wait 
on the Lord and meet him according to his 
promise. And sometimes they call him a pro- 
duct of that attention and expectancy. Is it 
so, or not ? The problem is crucial ; it is the 
problem of spirit and life ; it is the problem of 
the true way of mankind. My experience, like 
that of a multitude of men, proves incontestably 
to me, as theirs proves to each one of those men, 
that when we look for the appearing of the Christ- 
Child in our lives — the one place where he may 
reasonably be sought — he comes, he is found. 
That is to say, each finds in his life a new spirit ; 
a spirit not himself and yet becoming himself in 
impulse, in action ; a Spirit transforming him 
into its likeness ; the Spirit he looks for and 
worships in his Christmas adoration of the Lord. 
This Spirit is powerful in our lives ; it enables 
us to do that which we have vainly tried to do, 
it sets far from us evils we have desired to cast 
off and seen no way to cast off. We are as- 
tonished by ourselves, for we are new to our- 
selves. These are marvels that happen in the 
mysterious operation of Spirit in spirit ; and 
our lives bear them witness, our experience of 
them cannot be gainsaid, Christ comes, we say ; 



38 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

Christ lives in us, we say. It is faith ; but it is 
also knowledge. It is life and it is truth. 

What kind of knowledge ? What kind of 
truth ? A man may tell me that I talk non- 
sense about the Christ-Child. " My good Sir/' 
he may say, " even if Christ is alive at all, he is 
certainly not a child. He was once a child — 
that I must allow — but as a child he could have 
no influence over you, to speak of, even if you 
had been in Bethlehem (where he was not born) 
nineteen hundred and twenty-seven years ago 
(your chronology, you know, is wrong). And to 
talk of his coming now, in 1919, is sheer non- 
sense, and superstitious nonsense, at that. I 
suppose your belief is connected with the 
mediaeval doctrine of transubstantiation— but 
how any sane and sensible man" — and so 
forth. 

It is obvious that this kind of enquirer is 
seeking another kind of truth than that which 
I seek, than that which I sought and found 
when I " went to Bethlehem in the rare stillness 
of the early morning." I went in search of a 
truth of spirit and life coming with power, 
proving itself in the springs of action — a truth 
of inner experience, yet externally fruitful. He 
quarrels with me because he wants a truth of 
experiment after the manner of science, and of 



THE COMING OF CHRIST 39 

knowledge which any normal man can discover 
by his five senses and a machine-maker's use of 
his mind. His truth will no doubt have a value 
in life ; but it will be without force for him in 
the spiritual conduct of life, without fruit of 
the spirit's ideal. It may be historical truth, 
brute fact, or scientific fact (a very different 
thing), but it does not come to him with spiritual 
power. 

The truth I seek, on the other hand, is not 
spiritually ineffective. There are men, obviously, 
who cannot find it where I find it, many who 
seem not even to know how to begin to look for 
it. Yet they are often men who would certainly 
find a brute fact and, after a little training, a 
scientific fact, without difficulty. The discovery 
of my truth seems to be outside their range, at 
least as they are now. There are then different 
kinds of truth, and of facts. The finding of 
spiritually effective truth is a matter of the whole 
man — a vital process not unlike the process by 
which a man discovers and brings forth either 
the real apprehension of a poem or a poem itself. 
It is like what we call a work of genius ; it is 
both apprehensive and creative ; in fact it is 
work due to genius of the creative spiritual 
energy of personal life. And the language in 
which this kind of truth has to be expressed is, 



40 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

like all the language of genius, spiritually not 
scientifically symbolic ; it is not positiye, it is 
sacramental, and is truly understood only by 
those in whom truth itself grows to be a liying 
power of continued truth-seeking. 

I know, as well as my friend knows, that there 
is no child yisible to sense in that church ; yet I 
worship the Christ-Child there. I know, better 
than he knows, that the man who, in accepting 
the doctrine of transubstantiation, accepts a 
pseudo-explanation of that which cannot be 
explained, does not imagine any such thing ; 
yet the Christ-Child comes, perkajDS, to both 
him and me. The diyision between us and our 
critic lies deep ; it is the diyision between a 
kind of truth set apart from fullness of personal 
life and intercom m union of persons, and a kind 
of truth to be found only in glad acceptance of 
life communicated from that which reaches to 
the heayens and embraces the worlds. 



December 30th. — I haye found my diary of ten 
years ago saying about these great matters what 
I would say now, and I haye both added to it 
and quoted from it. All the changes and 
chances of those years haye not changed, though 



ST. JOHN 41 



they have, I think, expanded, my thought and 
belief in regard to those matters. This is as it 
should be. There should be a central core of 
truth, a real apprehending of the relation 
between God and man, which abides in the mind 
to test and, it may be, to incorporate and har- 
monize all else that comes. 

People talk nowadays of an acid test ; they 
are thinking, I suppose, of aqua regia, the test 
proving gold. This that I speak of is the royal 
test, the aqua regia, which the Christian has 
always to his hand. Test or core — two figures : 
we must always speak in figure, or by symbol 
or of sacrament, when we speak of spirit and 
life. " The words that I speak unto you," 
St. John hears Jesus say, " they are spirit and 
they are life." But they were ordinary words 
about bread and flesh and blood, which yet were 
figures the Jews could not understand, so St. 
John said. Bread and flesh and blood are 
indeed more than figures ; they are symbols 
conveying that which they symbolize ; they are 
sacraments. And St. John has the sacramental 
principle of life in his core of thought and of 
belief. That is his royal test. He applies it to 
history and dissolves away the dross that 
accumulates around the gold of spiritual truth ; 
and then of that gold he makes glories for his 



42 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

Lord, the sacramental Christ. Mystic and 
philosopher, he sees through the body of flesh 
and blood to inherent and eternal Spirit and 
Life, and proclaims the glory of God and man 
made manifest. The Word is become flesh and 
dwells among us. 

Not at first were the followers of Jesus able to 
see him as manifesting the divine Keason and 
Speech, the Word that was " in the beginning/' 
and " was with God " and " was God/' Not at 
first ; only after long years of opening vision 
and a revealing and confirming experience. 
Even then there was but one here or there en- 
dowed with the graces that bring such vision 
and allow experience to reveal such treasure. 
" May God us keep," says Blake, " From single 
vision and Newton's sleep ! " Single vision does 
not mean the single eye of the Gospels ; it means 
a vision in which a man sees only the outsides of 
things — flesh and blood as no more than flesh 
and blood — and is blind to spirit and life. It 
means eyes for which the world is not sacra- 
mental, has no depths and no mysteries, only a 
surface with puzzles on it. It means for Newton 
or any other man a sleep in which realities are 
travestied by dreams which make the problems 
of life seem superficial at the expense of their 
depth of fact. 



ST. JOHN 43 



The philosopher's dreams are different, yet 
he is often to his loss immersed in them. Not 
always ; sometimes he also has Blake's " four- 
fold vision " ; like St. John who, though he had 
learnt from philosophy about the Word who is 
the Wisdom, the Reason, and the Speech of 
God, was far more mystic than philosopher. 

I consider him, this man who had risen to 
such heights of vision and thought. I consider 
his history, his genesis, where he came from like 
us all, and what, unlike us, he became. His 
remotest forefathers were specks of living jelly, 
and he himself began as they had been. Through 
long uncounted ages the primitive jelly increased 
and multiplied and grew, and was formed into 
one plastic, unstable creature after another, 
until the great ali-but-men brought forth true 
men. His nearer forefathers, not so very long 
ago, were wild men, fighting and scheming to 
maintain bare life. Through all that history 
and its aeons life was a rising and spreading tide 
of ever new creations, passing rarely and here 
or there from one order to another and a higher, 
until in its main current the great ascent from 
solitary cell to man, homo sapiens, was com- 
plete. And now, for every man, life makes that 
same ascent, but swiftly. Now too it rises from 
the cell to man ; but the process that occupied 



44 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

millions of years is accomplished in nine months. 
What happens in those months condenses the 
tale of those millions of years. And then we 
have a descendant of wild fighting men, whose 
energies were concentrated on bare living, tell- 
ing us of the Word that becomes flesh and dwells 
among us. 

What must we think and say about the world 
of things and men and their history in the light 
cast on it by this man ? Yet more, what must 
we say about that world in the light cast by him 
whom this man saw in glory, in fullness of light 
and of power of life, in love grown perfect and 
showing therefore the perfection of God ? What 
can we say and think of all this ? 

The world is or may be changed for us ; it has 
become or it may become sacramental. We 
share the fourfold vision, or we may share it if 
we do not darken the uncomprehended light 
within us. Our scientific knowledge of man 
passes upward into a knowledge of incarnation ; 
we see all men as sacraments, as flesh and blood 
that are outward signs of spirit and life. We see 
them called to manifest God. That is what the 
fourfold vision brings. Have I really that 
vision ? Or do I only register in myself words 
about it as possessed by some other men ? Is 
it, after all, one of Blake's freakish fancies ? 



INSPIRATION 45 

does it stand open to every one of us, to me 
also ? That is a question to be faced. Are we 
able to see into our own depths and know that 
we possess it ? Learning from the Fourth 
Gospel picture of Jesus, do we learn of ourselves ? 
I am assured that if we do learn from that 
picture we certainly learn of ourselves : St. 
John, at all events, wrote to that end. 



January 10th. — St. John is inspired, we say : 
what do we mean by inspiration ? First, let me 
look at the men whom we commonly call 
inspired. Dante and Shakespeare, not Pope ; 
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, not Verdi, 
nor Gounod ; Turner, Puvis de Chavannes, 
Giotto, Rodin, Leonardo ; not Teniers, Meis- 
sonier, nor Leigh ton, with all their skill. I can 
picture to myself a giant standing at the summit 
of human intelligence and power of brain, know- 
ing all things that can be known in the intel- 
lectual way, master of all processes in that 
domain ; with a hand and eye that range from 
one field to another, and bring all into grasp 
and focus at his will. I can picture this Colossus 
of mind bestriding the world, and feel no inclina- 
tion to call him inspired. Not that way lies the 



46 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

advance of spirit ; not with such an eye or such 
a hand does a man reach the deep things of life, 
spiritual beauty and truth, holiness, love. Not 
that way does he find God, beneath the garment 
of God he knows and may describe so well. 

Evidently I demand of the inspired man that 
he shall penetrate beyond the look and skilful 
management of things. Somehow or other he 
must mingle with, interpenetrate, permeate, the 
mysterious heart of the world ; he must touch 
and handle its inner reality. I ask of him that 
he shall admit within himself, and give forth 
to us, what is incapable of full expression by 
material means or by logic and language ; and 
yet is able to stir in other men a response, a 
creative movement, in which they may attain 
to contact with that which was his charge. This 
may be beauty, holiness, love, wisdom, truth ; 
it may, in fact, be anything we are not afraid to 
say God is : but it is not discovered in mere 
knowledge, nor by mere skill, however great. 
It is even to a considerable extent independent 
of knowledge and skill, at least in any high degree. 
Inaccuracy, clumsiness, ignorance of a thousand 
relevant facts, will not arrest inspiration, nor 
altogether check its influence. " God has chosen 
the weak things/' the things of humility. It 
seems that not rarely there exists a kind of 



INSPIRATION 47 

strength which hinders, because it intoxicates, 
because it fixes attention, and above all because 
it ministers to pride and self-complacency. The 
spirit and the temper of the child are conditions 
of all high inspiration — humility, the desire to 
learn, faith and its venture, a hope neither failure 
nor reasoning can blight, a vision defying the 
boundaries of sense and thought. And with this 
temper, this spirit, true strength coincides — the 
strength, I suppose, made perfect in that divine 
weakness and irresistible power which is at once 
humility and the art of seeing things as they are. 
We are beginning to recognize these things. 
A new mind about inspiration is growing among 
us. We are abandoning the conduit theory which 
some of us applied only to the writers of the 
Bible ; and others, for the most part, to almost 
anybody else. We are beginning to see that a 
man must have certain powers and qualities, 
must offer certain conditions and remain under 
them, in order that he may be subject to inspira- 
tion. We see, too, that what he gives us is 
always himself raised to new heights of power, 
intensified in quality. He owns that which he 
bestows ; he does not merely pass it on. He 
colours it, shapes it, signs it with his inefface- 
able signature ; it is his, unique like himself, 
unique precisely as he is himself unique. 



48 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

The psychologists, some of them, speak of " an 
uprush of the subconscious " in the inspired man 
— in the man of genius in art, religion, life. I 
had rather (in the good company of Dr. Percy 
Gardner) call it "an inrush of the super- 
conscious/' It carries a man beyond his own 
mark, puts into his hands that which he cannot 
wholly grasp, sends him with a message he does 
not fully understand. It rouses in him, in fact, 
by means of hidden senses of the spirit, an 
intuitive perception with which he reaches out 
into the continuous life of God around him 
everywhere. He does indeed build better than 
he knows, speak more truly than he sees, supply 
needs of which he is unaware. And in this he 
is rectifying the balance of human faculty and 
power, developing within himself that gift of 
God we others have so little used, so heavily 
overlaid with weight of other gifts. 

The inspired man touches within himself, and 
without, the inner secrets of life — those secrets 
which the rationalizing intellect must always 
ignore. His peculiar process has in it some- 
thing of dream, of reverie, which fortifies re- 
flexion, and guides his constructive work. He 
develops for a higher use the magical endow- 
ment of those creatures who foresee that which 
no such creature has seen, or will ever see. Like 



THE CHRIST OF ST. JOHN 49 

them, but reaching far beyond them, he knows 
by an operation that is not mere reasoning. He 
embraces within his effective use, and brings to 
view powers latent or crushed out in most of us. 
He is not more than man ; but he is more of 
man than ordinary men are. 

Yet he is as fallible as any man in certain 
ways and matters. Physical or scientific facts, 
facts of common sense, are not guaranteed to 
him by his wisdom or his truth. Historic facts 
are not revealed to him, nor does he escape the 
habits and conditions of his time and place, of 
his people, of his ordinary knowledge, even of 
his prejudice and fancy. He remains man al- 
though he touches God and that truth of men 
which is yet to come. 

. Such a man wrote the Fourth Gospel. He is 
akin with all the artists ; he creates in his revela- 
tion, rather than records ; he shows us truth that 
lives and will always live, let history and science 
say what they may and must against his history 
and science. 



January 15th. — The inspired man is an artist ; 
that is, a creative interpreter. The Jesus of the 
Fourth Gospel is painted as a great artist paints 
a portrait. Not that which any man of intelli- 



50 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

gence may see is there, but that which one sees 
who enters into the inner meaning and pierces 
the sacramental veil that both hides and de- 
clares it. So when we read the discourses of 
Jesus we are reading of this inner meaning ; 
they are the strokes of the great artist's brush. 
Like the prophets before him, who prefaced 
their message of interpretation with " Thus 
saith the Lord/' he says, " Jesus said " that 
which he saw Jesus meant — that which the 
Divine Word meant. " I am the Way, and the 
Truth, and the Life " are words in which he 
hears speaking to him his own eternal way, the 
eternal truth his heart knows, the eternal life 
that is the eternal Christ living in him. " Be- 
cause I live, ye shall live also " — this he knows 
from his own living. " If a man love me, he will 
keep my word" — this he knows from his own 
loving. 

So it goes on ; this Evangelist, in those dis- 
courses, interprets Jesus Christ as no other 
Evangelist had interpreted him. And it is the 
same with the dramatized parables (" miracle- 
symbols," Baron von Hiigel calls them) of 
earlier chapters — the marriage feast, the raising 
of Lazarus, the woman at the well. They are 
symbols or parables of the eternal life-giver and 
life-restorer, and of the light enlightening every 



THE CHRIST OF ST. JOHN 51 

man that comes into the world. Years of 
reflexion and of piercing insight and sanctified 
life have given this great seer the artistic rights 
of the fourfold vision. With a master's hand he 
paints for us the portrait of a true Man who is 
wholly one with God, a Man whom he hears 
declaring justly that " all things whatsoever 
the Father hath " are his, and whom he 
hears praying that all men who follow him 
may be one with each other as he and his 
Father are one, and so be one with the Father 
and himself. 

If I did not believe that from the world of 
eternal life, which is the heart and sustenance of 
our world, Spirit comes to meet spirits and to 
inspire spirits ; if I did not believe that men 
can, and that some do, " see God with the eyes 
of God " I should not dare to accept this portrait 
of the Lord as the eternal Christ, the Word of 
God manifest in and as and through a Man. I 
should see Jesus as the Unknown Disciple sees 
him, or as a Jesus only of a certain history in 
Palestine. But I do believe these things, and 
St. John, as a witness to the inner meaning of 
the Lord, and to the Christ supremely manifest 
in him, comes to me as a faithful witness. His 
witness is borne out in every Christian who is 
Christian indeed. Every such man " hath the 



52 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

witness in himself/' And so has every man 
" that cometh into the world/' when he follows 
the divine light he sees. We who are Christians 
know that, and we should make more of it before 
the world. 



January 20th. — I have been compiling lately 
a book, the materials of which have waited to 
be used for some three hundred years. I call it 
The Confessions of Jacob Boehme. It is to be 
published in the spring of this year, long before 
my diary will have reached a printer. Boehme 
is a great man and travelled faithfully the only 
way for great or little men who are fulfilling 
human destiny. I cannot think why it was left 
to me to extract from the mass of his writings — 
all precious in their own fashion, no doubt — the 
gold of his self -recorded personal life in God. 
But so it is. And I find him fit to quote as a 
Christian witness beside St. John. " The Word," 
he says, " has opened itself everywhere, in every 
man's light of life, and there is wanting only 
this, that the soul-spirit give itself up thereto. 
In that soul-spirit God is born." . . . " Under- 
stand it right : God has longed to become flesh 
and blood ; and although the clear Deity con- 
tinues Spirit, yet it is become the Spirit and 



EXPECTATION OF THE KINGDOM 53 

Life of flesh and works in the flesh. So we say 
that when we with our imagination [and by 
imagination he means what Blake means by it] 
enter into God, and wholly give ourselves up to 
him, we enter into God's flesh and blood and 
live in God. . . . Thus now to us the birth and 
incarnation of Christ is a joyful and very weighty 
matter." 

Not a mere occurrence once in history — this 
birth and incarnation ; but an eternal fact of 
life recurrent in time, and everywhere in time. 
This every mystic knows, and every man who in 
any degree " sees God with the eyes of God." 
You have only to hunger and thirst after truth 
and beauty and justice (which our books call 
righteousness) to make that sublime discovery 
of God dwelling in man. Only, I say ; but just 
there is the proving-point of true religion. If 
you hunger and thirst, passionately desire, that 
trinity, or even no more than justice and truth 
or justice and beauty (there must be justice), 
you find God meeting your desire and feeding you 
with himself. " In that soul-spirit God is 
born " ; for it is yielding itself to God who 
longs always to give himself. He bears our 
sorrows and our sins in bearing our nature as his 
Cross and us in his heart. And he comes in the 
measure of men's desires, for their desires are 



54 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

effectual prayers and open or close the door 
between them and him. 

Jacob Boehme knows this well. It was he 
who taught William Law to write The Spirit of 
Prayer and The Spirit of Love, and shake the 
dust of A Serious Call from his feet. Yet he 
made many intellectual mistakes. In places he 
is almost unreadable, with his vicious philology, 
and his alchemical jargon. But in mistakes and 
ignorance he shares the lot of all men, even of 
our greatest seers and saints and prophets. And 
of late we have learnt to estimate this failing 
more justly than we did before. In learning new 
things about the human mind we have learnt to 
carry far the critical distinction between truth 
of spirit and life, and truth of historical or 
scientific fact. We have therefore learnt at last 
to understand better the intellectual errors of 
saints and prophets and seers. Even the Man 
wholly possessed by God, a Man different in 
order from all the saints, must, if he were truly 
man, reflect, conceive and picture like other men. 
He must be of a people, a time, a place ; he 
must grow in wisdom as in stature ; and he too 
must share many of the difficulties of all men, 
and find himself bound by many of their condi- 
tions. Like them he must see, as well as express, 
in pictures and in words, truth of spirit and life, 



EXPECTATION OF THE KINGDOM 55 

truth beyond the compass of all pictures and all 
words. Even that Man who is fully God, the 
Man in whom God has become expressed as man, 
must embody in terms of time by the earth's 
measures and of space projected and understood 
in the human intellectual way the truth of man's 
relation to God. His language and mental 
pictures may well be as far from historical or 
scientific validity as any other man's, as far 
from superficial accuracy as any poet's, as far 
from photographic representation as those 
pictures of him that have been seen in vision by 
his saints, as that picture of him given by St. 
John. 

It is said that he himself made the mistake 
his followers certainly made about the " second 
coming." That may be so. Yet it must have 
been he who said " The kingdom of God cometh 
not with observation : neither shall they say, 
Lo here ! or, Lo there ! for behold the kingdom 
of God is within you." No believer in an 
immediate second coming could have written 
those words unless Jesus had spoken them. But 
the very vividness of his intuition, the keenness 
of his spiritual insight, the immediacy of his real 
knowledge, his perfect union with God, and the 
poignant agony of his love for men, would be 
likely to quicken and foreshorten time for him, 



56 CHRISTIANHT AND CHRIST 

so that he would almost see with bodily eyes the 
consummation of that kingdom — " the glory of 
the sum of things " immanent already in the 
present chaos, and keeping pace with the urgency 
of his desire for its coming, hastening to make 
good the word of the prophets which was ringing 
in his ears. And this would be no mistake such 
as his followers made. It would be the stress of 
a vision beyond their vision breaking in upon 
the conditions of a human mind. 

Even for mere saints — it is of their nearness 
to heavenly things — the glory of God, the love 
of God, the judgements and demands of God, 
are here and now ; they are present, active ; 
they are ready for men to see and hear, if men 
would but open their eyes and listen to the uni- 
versal message. So they think ; and some- 
times they are surprised that any man escapes 
the revelation so plain to them, that any man 
fails to see through the tenuous veil of flesh the 
light which for them overpowers all the fictions 
of a world of flesh. They are not surprised that 
heaven is close at hand, nor that they can see it 
here as Boehme did ; they wonder that any man 
is blind to it, that every man does not hear the 
voice of God above all other sounds. And often 
they have their impatience, the translation of 
their longing and their love. They would hasten 



EXPECTATION OF THE KINGDOM 57 

the kingdom, tear down the veil, compel men to 
listen and look. They would use the violence of 
love, the onslaught of self-sacrifice, against those 
walls set between earth and heaven which 
divide men from their own good and their 
salvation. " The kingdom of heaven suffereth 
violence," they declare ; and by the con- 
descension of divine love, " the violent " may 
" take it by force." Therefore they would storm 
heaven for love of the brethren, as their Master 
did when he laid down his life — as he had lived 
— to bring the kingdom of heaven among men 
upon earth, that kingdom which was " not of 
this world." 

This is of the psychology of the saints. Their 
intellect, too, springs from the same root as our 
own ; their minds have been schooled like ours. 
No man escapes the consequences of the birth 
and breeding of human intellect. Even God, 
permeating the life of a man without any 
hindrance by his self-will, even God thus reveal- 
ing himself to the utmost of humanity, must be 
limited by the conditions of the man. Just as 
he must be in one shape of body, not in all ; 
belong to one race, use one language, have one 
religion ; so he must have one knowledge. And 
one knowledge means some ignorance, simply 
because it is finite. It leaves room for mistake 



58 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

according to the fashion of a man's intellect, 
mistake due to the genesis of intellect, and to the 
influence of social inheritance, tradition, teach- 
ing, upon the individual mind. If Jesus could 
be tired, could be hungry and thirsty, in his 
body, so he could be subject to natural limita- 
tions in his intellectual process. " Why," says 
Tyrrell, " if God did not disdain the role of a 
poor man and a tempted man, should he disdain 
that of an ignorant man, wherein to reveal the 
Spirit victorious over the very commonest human 
limitations ? It is not from the human mind 
that he had, but from the divine Spirit that he 
was, that man has drawn strength to conquer 
ignorance and weakness, energy to fight against 
darkness and wickedness, however costly, how- 
ever interminable the conflict." 

We may say, then, that although Jesus puri- 
fied and spiritualized the Jewish hope of the 
coming of the kingdom on earth, as he purified 
and spiritualized everything he touched, and 
therefore did not share in their fashion the error 
of his disciples about it, yet, like them, he was 
ignorant of times and seasons ; and so, having 
a power of vision in spiritual things far exceed- 
ing theirs, he would not only strain his own power 
of interpreting his vision for them, but strain 
even more their understanding of him. It is not 



THE GOOD NEWS 59 

difficult to see how their mistake arose — unless 
we forget that their Master was true man. It is 
possible that he really did share their mistake, 
but this would in no way make him less certainly 
true God in man. But on the other hand we 
must never forget that the Gospel accounts of 
him were written by men who necessarily saw 
him through a veil of their own prepossessions 
and dominant beliefs. 



January 30th. — I bear in mind that the Good 
News for which every man seeks is news of more 
life. More life means growing happiness and the 
witness of true joy ; and happiness is plainly 
the desire of the heart, and even of the senses 
and the mind, in all men. I see men who are 
looking for it in the hells they build about them ; 
I see them, I cannot help seeing them, hungering 
for more life, yet going, apparently, straight 
towards the second death. And when they 
despair of happiness I find that they despair, 
too, of the poor life they have and seem to be 
losing. An animal may be content with the life 
he has, the life that is only not at a standstill 
because it is quietly running down its natural 
declivity into the grave ; probably it is well 



60 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

content after its fashion. But a man — no, it is 
obvious that he is always discontent, unless it 
be in some lowest hell reached after he has 
passed the long length of that road of second 
death. Then he may be satisfied in a new fashion, 
because, maybe, he is no longer man. Now he 
has still the prerogative of man, the hunger for 
more life which his capacity entails upon him ; 
he has no animal completeness. The prodigal 
son, in the far country and still prodigal at heart 
though bankrupt of possessions, ate swine's food 
rather than nothing ; and the insatiable appetite 
of human life, the longing for happiness in the 
increase of life, drives men hither and thither, 
through waste places and places that abound, 
seeking, always seeking, blindly and foolishly, 
or with the wisdom that is divine, for news of 
more life — Gospel news. 

Again I remind myself that creative life in our 
world drives itself, by the myriad ways of its 
dispersal, to form the individual lives we see, and 
those we have for our own ; and that no one of 
them, not even man's, shews in itself the full 
capacity of life. Man — the microcosm, as we call 
him — is plainly wanting in the skill shown by 
the insect that is, for example, a better surgeon 
within its narrow range than any man. Some of 
these little ephemeral creatures die quickly after 



THE GOOD NEWS 61 

laying their eggs. Never in the whole history of 
their race does any one of them see its de- 
scendants ; and yet it will provide for the safety 
of coming generations by what looks like an 
elaborate, detailed, far-seeing care. Where we 
must learn gradually, and perhaps never know 
well, using guess, hypothesis, experiment, com- 
parison, those creatures act directly and all but 
unerringly. They act as if they felt (and who 
shall say they do not feel ?) the continuity of life 
from within ; as if they shared other lives and 
other bodies as elements in their own, and could 
use them and work in them and for them or 
against them, as truly to their own purpose. 
We men have carried reflective intellectual power 
to the highest point reached in the animal king- 
. dom ; but we have neglected our elementary 
endowment of intuition. In the feel of the con- 
tinuity of things, in an interior knowledge and 
power of life, we are far behind the attainment 
of the gad-fly. We pay for our intellectual 
supremacy ; but all characters of life are our 
characters, and in the long run, if we will con- 
sent to learn our lesson, the right balance may 
be reached. Intellect may uplift our intuition 
and intuition may glorify intellect. We know 
not what we shall be ; and the ways of growth 
we have neglected are open still. 



62 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

Meanwhile we display (to the angels and the 
seers, if not elsewhere) a promising and plastic 
monstrosity. We are asymmetrical but not 
fixed ; and therein lies our hope. Only in man 
is there any such monstrosity. For man, when 
he abandons his truth and yields himself to the 
sway of the senses or of the over-balancing 
intellect, keeps still his creative coordinating 
spirit, and has an organ fitted for the life of 
spirit. He may belie his owm purpose, he may 
misuse his magnificent brain ; but his capacity 
for God and his need of God stand manifest even 
in his failure to respond to the call of his longing 
and his power. 

All this because, as I am continually telling 
myself, life has found in him alone a way to- 
wards ampler freedom, in which may be brought 
to fruition not only its sense character, its 
intellectual character, and even its intuitive 
character ; but a wholeness of character that by 
advance in personal life raises all these towards 
a destined fulfilment in union with the life of the 
divine Spirit. 

Man is powerful, " the reed that thinks/' and 
poorer than any other creature upon earth. His 
poverty bears witness to his power ; his poverty 
and his doom on earth, if earth were all. 



THE GOOD NEWS 63 

" Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above, 
Thou shinedst there ere any life began, 

When of his pain or of his powerless love 
Thou heardest not from heart of any man ; 

Though long the earth had shaken off the vapour 

Left by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper, 
Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did grow 

Ere aught but her blind elements did move ; 
Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go, 
And afterwards again shalt see her so. 

" A time there was when Life had never been, 
A time will be, it will have passed away ; 

Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene, 
When Life which in thy sister's yesterday 

Had never flowered, will have drooped and faded ; 

Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded. 
She will be barren then as not before, 

Bared of her snows and all her garments green ; 
No darkling sea by any earthly shore 
Will take thy rays : thy kin will be no more." 

The poet (his fine poem on The Moon is in the 
second number of The London Mercury) knows 
death and the night that comes. We know 
also that if generation after generation is con- 
demned to work for a generation that may well 
never come upon our transient earth, the tree of 
life is barren. It is barren for us who pass away ; 
it will be barren still when the last catastrophe 
arrives, even though the generation reaping the 
profits of our toil has come ; for the bitterness 
of final death will be theirs as it is ours. Our 
own disaster, too, is the greater if we must look 



64 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

forward to that final death for them, and to a 
lifeless earth. We know this ; it should be 
enough for us. No dream of naturalistic progress 
here can satisfy our needs. The night always 
comes and the grave is always dug. 

1 We survey the past, and see that its history 
is of blood and tears, of helpless blunder- 
ing, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of 
empty aspirations. We sound the future, and 
learn that after a period, long compared with 
the individual life, but short indeed compared 
with the divisions of time open to our investiga- 
tion, the energies of our system will decay, the 
glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, 
tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the 
race which has for a moment disturbed its 
solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all 
his thoughts will perish. The uneasy conscious- 
ness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief 
space broken the contented silence of the 
universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself 
no longer. ' Imperishable monuments ' and 
( immortal deeds/ death itself, and love stronger 
than death, will be as though they had never 
been. Nor will anything that is be better or be 
worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, 
and suffering of man have striven through count- 
less generations to effect." 



THE ASCENT OF LIFE 65 

That is Mr. Balfour. Yet the title of the book 
which contains it is The Foundations of Belief. 
If it were not for the Good News of more life and 
in abundance, and for our faith that such life is 
the eternal meaning and fulfilment of our tran- 
sitory days, we might well say that our tale is 
an idiot's, a tale of " sound and fury, signifying 
nothing." All human aspiration, the clamour 
of our spirits' need, the unveiling of possibilities 
inevitably frustrate here, would be vain and 
purposeless, like music from some statue of 
Memnon in a dead world. 

Either there is unreason at the root of the 
universe or earth-life is not all the life for us. 



February 7 th. — I look again at the slow ascent 
from the steamy cloud-sheltered lagoon and the 
primaeval jelly-stuff, and even there I see life 
straining for a larger utterance — marvellous life 
with incalculable powers, and a profoundly 
hidden versatility. Through the uncounted 
millions of years it strains, finding its way very 
slowly and imperfectly, sometimes missing it, 
sometimes losing it after it had been found. At 
last it reaches, along the freest of its ways, the 
high expressiveness of arboreal man, our lowly 



66 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

ancestor. He has a very mobile brain and for 
its use a tool of tools, the hand he had inherited 
from his amphibian forbears and had not spoilt 
by specializing it into, say, a paw or a wing. 
True, the apes, his near cousins in the trees, had 
also kept that hand ; but life had not made a 
way of creative freedom in their brains as it had 
in his. 

I think of this ; and I see the tree-man driven 
by increasing cold into the shelters where we 
have found cave-man and his tool-work and 
artistry. Thence life moves at a faster pace, a 
gathering pace. From the beginning the pace 
of life in man has quickened ; and from the 
men of the caves to us as we are is the matter of 
a lightning flash compared with the rise from a 
one-celled to a many-celled creature. Every- 
thing goes quicker for us ; now each one of us 
condenses the whole ascent of life from cell to 
man (as I said St. John did, I remember) in his 
own short progress of a few short pre-natal 
months. Then — what then ? 

Very swiftly the child becomes the full-grown 
man, standing to face a world and knowing that 
he stands and faces it. This is the grand plateau 
of life, where it is able to turn round, as it were, 
upon itself, to know itself and a world. You 
may see it, with your imaginative eye, taking 



THE ASCENT OF LIFE 67 

breath, pausing, looking round, searching within, 
like Le Penseur of Rodin, the primitive man who 
first attained human soul-stature and heard a 
summons to reflective thought. 

Here indeed is more life showing at last, on its 
long way of ascent, some signs of what it is all 
about, what it seeks in man and has begun to 
find. 

But the way is now different, though the 
same ; there is " continuity of process, with the 
emergence of real differences/' as Pringle- 
Pattison says. Always continuity, yet real 
differences emerging as per saltum. There was a 
moment when Le Penseur shook himself awake 
from the animal sleep-walking ; as there is a 
moment now when a man " repents " and " is 
converted." " Whereas I was blind, now I see/' 
he says. And you may call it a moment, whether 
it comes as it came to St. Paul on the road to 
Damascus, or is coming (it may take a century 
or centuries) to us, politically, economically, in 
our societies and nations. For our fontal source 
of life (shall I call it now, since it has reached 
man, the immanent Spirit of God ? or Christ ? 
or the Word of God ?) strives with men, and at 
moments or in centuries their resistance fails 
and they are won. They are won to more life, 
to that for which they are always seeking even 



68 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

when they seek it down blind alleys and along the 
crooked roads blindness and folly mark out. 

We hear now of cooperation as the only remedy 
for our social ills. We hear of it everywhere — 
between nation and nation, between scholar and 
teacher, between labourer and capitalist, where 
not ? — and it is to do away with war, open 
or disguised. There has certainly been war 
between teachers and scholars, labourer and 
capitalist, nation and nation, between every 
man almost and his neighbour, hitherto. We 
cannot see the relations between these as they 
really are until we see the gulf of difference there 
is between pulling with and pushing against, 
between working with and warring against. It 
is all of a piece, this mess of things. We tried 
forcing knowledge into children, forcing work 
out of workers, forcing other nations to let us 
have anything we wanted from them. And 
education was a by-word and a disgrace ; there 
is industrial revolution ; and our political peace 
is pregnant with war. Civilization is indicted at 
the bar of our self-interest as well as at the bar 
of justice, human and divine. So we are to 
cooperate. 

I see cooperation in two shapes, as an angel 
of light foretelling real communion and personal 
fellowship ; and as a servant of Mammon. 



THE ASCENT OF LIFE 69 

Honesty evidently (for the most part though 
not always) is the best policy ; that is, it is 
profitable according to the maxims of the God 
Mammon. So, it seems, is cooperation. And I 
am strongly of opinion that it is. But I distrust 
the God Mammon and all his maxims. " More 
life " does not come that way. The Spirit does 
not strive with our spirits for that. And I can 
picture to myself a whole world of cooperators 
who shall certainly be more prosperous and 
more substantially comfortable, yet remain on 
the same level of life from which they started, 
while the Spirit grieves and in their spirits they 
fail. 

Yet it may be otherwise. There is something 
gained by a man's being honest, even from 
policy ; gained for the social whole if not for the 
individual man. And I see much gain through 
cooperation between teacher and taught ; though 
I have to own that there Mammon has no fair 
field. It is out in the commercial, industrial, and 
generally developed world of societies of the 
grown-up that he has his due chance. There I 
fear him, even among cooperators, who are at 
least imitating methods of the Spirit. Never- 
theless, imitation is itself informing. Just as 
you may make yourself feel angry by imitating 
an angry face and body, frowning, glaring, 



CHRISTIAXITT AXD CHRIST 

clenching youi fists, so you may (perhaps or 
probably) make yourself incline to love your 
neighbour as yourself by acting as though you 
did. I am not sore that this is not one of the 
subtle schemes of life, through which " function." 
as the biologists say. induces " structure.'''' And 
from the bottom of my soul I hope it is ; for we 
are being driven to try it. War of all kinds, like 
thieving, stands discredited as not bringing us 
safely what we want. 

After all. self-interest should, you may say, 
lead us into the way of more life. In a deep 
sense it should ; but there comes in the paradox 
c : :_e more life that is fitting, true, real, for any 
man who is a man. He has entered upon his 
heritage of life and owns it. So he must lay it 
down if he is to gain lif-. That is the law of life 
for all owners of it, even, it seems, for God, who 
in laying down his life for us wins us and ours 
for himself. The Cross in the heart of God and 
the Cross on the hill at Jerusalem tell the secret 
of man. " He that saveth his life shall lose it." 
" Die to live.''" 

Both these adjurations would sound absurd 
to arboreal man, nearly as absurd s they would 
sound to a monkey or a goldfish. And they 
would be absurd. But to St. John, for instance, 
or to General Gordon, or Eabmdranath Tagore. 



THE APPROACH TO GOD 71 

they would be truisms. What are they to us, to 
you and me ? 



February 20th. — It is said of Jacopone da 
Todi (I quote, naturally, Evelyn Underhill) 
" that when he came out of his prison and the 
glory of an Italian autumn met eyes which for 
five years had seen only the walls of his under- 
ground den, he composed and sang the beautiful 
lauda which praises the Love of God as revealed 
in Creation ; seen, heard, and tasted in all 
lovely things/' The legend is a legend, the 
author warns us, but " we should like to believe 
it." Certainly this poet and devotee of God had 
changed from " the bitter distrust of the senses 
and contempt for their reports " which marked 
his early ascetic period, to the joy in them which 
he showed in later life and sang of in that lauda, 
of which these are the first two stanzas. 

" amor, divino amore, 
perche m'hai assediato ? 
Pare de me empazato, 
non puoi de me posare. 

" Da cinque parte veggio 
che m'hai assediato : 
audito, viso, gusto, 
tatto ed odorato ; 
se esco, so pigliato, 
non me te pos' occultare." 



72 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

I cannot resist entering here Mrs. Theodore 
Beck's rendering in English of these stanzas : — 

" Love Divine and Great, 

Why dost Thou still besiege my heart ? 
Of me infatuate Thou art, 
From me Thou canst not rest ! 

" My five engirdling battlements 
Are all besieged by Thee ; 
The Ear, the Eye, Taste, Smell, and Touch, 
By Love, mine Enemy : 
If I come forth I cannot flee, 
Nor hide me from Thy quest." 

God, it seems, makes all avenues of approach 
to us his avenues. Yet how carefully and care- 
lessly we avoid him and let our enemies come in ! 
I am reminded, perforce, of Francis Thompson : 

" I fled Him, down the nights and down the days ; 
I fled Him, down the arches of the years ; 
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 

Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes I sped ; 
And shot, precipitated 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. 
But with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
They beat — and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet — 
' All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.' " 



THE APPROACH TO GOD 73 

So the secret is told. There is only one way, 
the way he is, the way that is Christ. Do we 
not know it when once we have found Christ ? 
Were not all ways ways of betrayal for us when 
we were betraying him ? And there, facing us, 
the awful fact stands — we can and do betray 
him, even though we " cast out devils " in his 
name, taking it in vain. 

We can betray him too without knowing his 
name, while we entertain subtle devils whom 
we decide to see as angels of light and permit to 
betray us who are willing, even desirous, to be 
betrayed. Populus vult decipi. So the world goes 
on, according to its desire. :s We love we know 
not what, and therefore everything allures us/ 5 

Jacopone da Todi had found good practical 
cause as well as bad doctrinal reasons for dis- 
trusting those avenues of sense in which later 
he learnt to walk with God. Until the world is 
transfigured to the divine kingdom or until our 
own " fourfold vision " translates it for us as at 
least a theophany, sense, mind, our own hearts, 
are all dangerous and convoy hidden dangers to 
us. They are " natural," we say ; we must rely 
on them, we must obey their impulse ; they are 
guaranteed by nature and nature's law. But 
everyone of them proves traitorous. Then, 
perhaps, the ascetic revolutionary that lurks in 



74 CHRISTIANHT AND CHRIST 

most men has his revenge. " All or none," he 
says, " yon have tried all, it must be none." 
And the ascetic revolutionary is supported by a 
false God. 

If God is away there, remote, a judge, a king, 
with commands and doom to administer ; if he 
reigns without, impassible, severe, the once 
manufacturing Great First Cause, not the Poet 
and Lover of his worlds ; if he is a God of our 
inheritance from before Christ whom theo- 
logians and we have vainly tried to harmonize 
with the God in Christ ; we may well despair of 
finding anything but betrayal through our 
senses. It is not he that we find ; it is only his 
handiwork, and that has been spoilt since he 
abandoned it. So it seems. 

The God who is Love and is by nature the 
supreme Self-giver, the God who is Father to 
Jesus Christ and to us, whose love for us is the 
Hound of Heaven that never halts in pursuit of 
us — this God does us no such evil turn. 

Theologians speak of God's immanence, his 
dwelling in his creatures ; they also speak of his 
transcendence over them. When they do I am 
always moved to ask how a God can dwell in us 
unless he comes to us from beyond. The pan- 
theist's God is not indwelling ; he is one with 
the world ; he is the world and the world is he. 



THE NEW GENESIS 75 

It is only a transcendent God who can come to 
us and as immanent take up his abode with us. 
If he does this, as I am assured he does, he and 
his worlds, my senses, my mind, my whole nature 
and every nature, are illuminated for me. The 
world of sense, the world of thought, I myself, 
may reveal him — or, in the want of him, also 
may reveal him. Without him they signify him, 
as darkness signifies light, injustice, justice, and 
all evil good. 

If a man has eyes to see God and the want of 
God, his world becomes more than a theophany, 
it is a sacrament ; he lives in the midst of divine 
wonders communicated to him. And he cannot 
be among those who ask for signs of God, 
because all things for him are signs of God ; the 
ordered and mysterious universe he touches and 
handles, and ordered or unordered men. There 
is nothing that does not show either God or the 
dreadful want of God. And a man's life, when 
he is not betraying life, is to him that which has 
carried him upward from the dust to where he 
has met with God ; and is carrying him still. 



February 22nd, — A new and grander Book of 
Genesis has been opened for us lately. Chris- 



76 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

tians, I note, are slow to read it. Yet if they 
could only get rid of their belief that the Bible, 
the collection of books they have inherited as 
their Biblia Sacra, is an isolated and completed 
record of the working of God for men and with 
men, they would, I think, allow the new Genesis 
a place of high honour. 

I often wonder whether they believe that the 
Spirit of Wisdom has rested since the last page 
of their Bible was turned, or whether they think 
there was no recording instrument for Wisdom's 
work before letters were invented. You would 
think so, when you see them exasperatingly 
turning their backs on the writings in chalk and 
stone and coal measures and gravel in the earth's 
crust. Those records, at all events, were not 
distorted by any human amanuensis before they 
were opened to be read. And they tell of the 
Creator's manner and method, and from begin- 
ning to end they treat of the history of man and 
must be interpreted through man. You would 
be sure, wouldn't you ? that every religious man 
would eagerly study such a record that he might 
learn about God and himself. I am bewildered 
as well as exasperated because it is men who are 
not religious that are far more desirous of such 
knowledge. Yet I know the established diffi- 
culty of getting into men's minds any idea, any 



THE NEW GENESIS 77 

attraction, that does not accord with habit and 
old convictions, however ill acquired. We are 
spoilt, I suppose, most of us, in early youth ; 
the springs of receptivity that belong to youth 
are dried up within us by heaps of arid informa- 
tion which we never wanted and can never use. 
William James says somewhere that most men 
cease to be plastic at twenty-five. They are 
prematurely old by that time ; for the remainder 
of their lives they drag the same ideas round and 
round like superannuated horses in a mill. 

Moreover, many Christians hold that a duty 
proclaimed by influential persons, which involves 
going round and round in a theological mill, is 
binding on them. To look for words of God in 
the crust of the earth, and in creatures either 
dead long ago or alive and letting out secrets 
now to scientific men, might turn out to be rash 
innovation. For these Christians science remains 
suspect ; the geological record is now as danger- 
ous as the telescope was once. Even men of 
official standing in the Church, men of intelli- 
gence and cultivation too, whose minds have not 
been fixed at twenty-five, are sometimes distrust- 
ful of science. I asked the late Dr. Figgis why 
he had said what he did say about it in The 
Gospel and Human Needs, why he had accused 
it of describing the whole world of life and things 



78 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

as iron-bound by mechanical necessity (I forget 
his actual words), and so leaving no room for 
God. He said : " Because I thought that was 
true " ; and explained that he had learnt since 
" from The Hibbert " that it was not. You 
will notice, if you look at his book, that his argu- 
ment for the human need to have miracles in 
order to show that God exists and works is con- 
siderably damaged if what he says of science 
cannot stand. But that is by the way. The 
thing I feel incumbent on me is to note what 
justification there was for such a mistake on 
his part, and how that justification has ceased 
to be. 

There once was justification, at least for men 
who could not distinguish between knowledge 
of truth in experience and interpretation of it or 
inference from it. I remember a meeting of 
pathetic old gentlemen, a quarter of a century 
after the publication of The Origin of Species, 
who were protesting with all their poor might 
against any evolutionary science. I remember 
well the look of forlorn hope in that assembly. 
It was forlorn indeed and soon died out alto- 
gether. But (and here comes in the justification 
for Dr. Figgis which he might reasonably have 
claimed in the last century) the sciences of life 
fell victims for a time to the sciences of matter. 



THE NEW GENESIS 79 

Mechanism overcame them. I, for instance, was 
taught physiology, by a most distinguished 
professor of it, as the physics and chemistry of 
the animal body regarded as a machine. So life 
was disregarded ; and the living mind of man 
became an insignificant, irrelevant product of his 
mechanically working body. Science had not 
gone far enough. 

Such a state of things amply justified Chris- 
tian protest, though not in the ill-considered* 
wholesale and undiscriminating shape it fre- 
quently took. But that state of things has not 
lasted, could not last. Science was bound to go 
further. The new biology is not dependent on 
physics and chemistry and mechanics for its 
principles. It has its own ; and it has found 
the need of them because many new facts have 
been discovered. New experiments have been 
made, and new interpretations and new terms 
had to be provided. 

This is plain enough for most of us now ; but 
years ago there were men who saw that the 
mechanistic stage must pass. Lotze, in this 
extract from his Metaphysic, showed the weak- 
ness of that position : " Those who pray too 
much are destined, says the proverb, to pray 
themselves through heaven and to keep geese 
on the other side. A better fate has befallen 



8o CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

those who, out of a conscientious regard for the 
interests of science, have felt themselves com- 
pelled to derive Organic Life from blind chance 
and purposeless matter. They have invested 
their original principles with so much reason 
and power of internal development that nothing 
but the caprice of their terminology, which keeps 
to the names of Matter, Mechanism, and Acci- 
dent, for what other people call Spirit, Life, and 
Providence, seems to prevent them from relapsing 
into notions which they have before strenuously 
opposed/' 

Lotze did not live to see the mechanistic 
terminology changed for one more befitting life ; 
but he saw what had to come, or rather, not 
seeing, he certainly believed. As to us, we have 
only to open our eyes and look. There is ample 
evidence before us that no living creature is a 
machine. Hence the new biology ; hence many 
fascinating pages in the new Book of Genesis. 
And above all, hence a meeting-place between 
science and religion, where the scientific study 
of the world merges into the vision of sacrament, 
and the scientific study of man into the dis- 
covery of divine incarnation. 

Have many of us Christians read much in this 
new book, which is not only of origins but of 
destiny, not only of the manners of God but of 



THE NEW BIOLOGY 81 

his purpose ? Have many of us, even of those 
who have bent themselves to find the religious 
values of the old tradition of the Bible and of the 
later tradition of the Creeds, sought religious 
values in the revelation of science ? I think not. 
Yet they are there, and may be had for no great 
hardship in seeking. 

The Genesis of the Hebrew Testament is a 
great book. Compare its tradition of the begin- 
ning of things with any others in The Golden 
Bough and you will confess that it is great. It 
is worthy of a great people. But it is not what 
it seemed once. Its cosmogony is poetry, not 
history. Now, in our new Genesis, we are un- 
veiling facts of history and reading the true 
record of the world for the first time. It gives 
us a volume of the works of the supreme Poet, 
whose epic is the universe. 

" And thus have you a Gate, in the prospect 
even of this world, whereby you may see into 
God's Kingdom." 



February 25th. — When I learnt how a sea- 
urchin's egg helps to upset the mechanistic 
interpretations of biology made in the nine- 
teenth century I became a biological enthusiast, 
and added more biological chapters to my new 



82 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

Genesis. I learnt that if, instead of letting this 
egg, the cell, divide again after its first division 
into two cells, you skilfully remove one of the 
two, you will get not half an embryo-urchin, as 
on the mechanical theory you would expect, but 
a whole one, small indeed but whole. You may 
even let the two cells divide into four and take 
away three of them, yet have the happy result 
of an embryo, smaller still but just as whole. 
A newt's egg, or a frog's, will do the same 
for you. 

That fired me. Behind this business I saw the 
life of a self-guiding creature dodging attempts 
to thwart its intentions — a persevering life, a 
clever life inventing a new plan, and (as a 
biologist has said) " working out its own salva- 
tion upon original and individual lines/' 

What do you think Huxley would have made 
of this ? I am sure he would have revised his 
conviction that human creatures are " conscious 
automata," and that human minds are " epi- 
phenomenal " shadows cast by the solid material 
stuff of their brains. If that experiment, and all 
the researches of Dr. Haldane and other physio- 
logists into the delicate cleverness of the body's 
adjustment to varying conditions had been made 
in his time, we should have had our new biology 
far sooner. Indeed, it is likely that the mechan- 



THE NEW BIOLOGY 83 

istic scheme would never have had a chance of 
dominating over ordinary men : it was new, a 
mushroom growth that sprang up in a night and 
has died down in a day. Or if it has not died 
(Huxley himself said that there is nothing men 
hate more than having to revise their convic- 
tions), it is dying fast. 

There is no escaping the moral of these things 
for us Christians, unless we are firmly set against 
revising certain of our own convictions. At least 
so it seems to me ; although the back of my mind 
is haunted by a ghost of a suspicion that unless 
Christians can be caught very young and then 
taught, for instance, the new Genesis as a com- 
ment on the old, and the new criticism of New 
Testament documents as corrective of the old, 
they will for long continue to escape. Many of 
their teachers were brought up to believe that 
precious things of the spirit would be lost if the 
letter of the law were publicly tampered with ; 
and they continue to teach. I heard a dignitary 
in the pulpit of St. Paul's declare that if the 
Bible in his hand was not without mistakes 
from cover to cover the Christian Faith was lost. 
That was many years ago ; no man in the pulpit 
of St, PauFs would dare or even wish nowadays 
to say anything of the kind. But it is one thing 
to be silenced by force from without and quite 



84 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

another to speak freely and in courageous can- 
dour from within. Our teachers still have their 
guarding reservations ; but I want to see wel- 
come given to every gleam of new light ; I want 
to see them eagerly looking for new light, con- 
fident that the Spirit of God may find openings 
for his wisdom everywhere and that he abides 
with men. I want them to act as though St. 
John meant something for our own days when 
he spoke of the Spirit given that men might be 
led into all truth. I want them to know to good 
practical purpose that Christ has still many 
things to tell, which still they " cannot bear." 
It will be well for them to learn to bear those 
already told. If they do not they may perhaps 
make themselves stone-deaf to those that are 
to come. 

It is true that no preacher in St. Paul's could 
make the Christian faith depend now on the in- 
errancy of the Bible ; but only a little while ago 
an able and honest writer, a well-known clergy- 
man, said that if proof were forthcoming that 
Jesus was not born of a Virgin the whole fabric 
of the Faith would be destroyed for him. And 
lesser clergymen are saying the same thing. So 
it is only one precarious holding after another for 
such men. In one set it is an infallible Bible, in 
another an infallible Church ; for this man now 



THE NEW BIOLOGY 85 

it is the Virgin Birth, just as for that (but 
centuries ago) it was a fixed earth with a satellite 
sun. Yet there can be no knowledge that is not 
knowledge about God, whether it be of the 
nature of things, or of birds, beasts and fishes, 
of rocks and flowers, or of man, his history and 
his sacred books, his mind and his body. Does 
not God indwell his worlds by his Spirit and his 
creative Word, by the energy of his abounding 
life and his self-giving love ? Shall we let our- 
selves be deceived by the limits that he himself 
encounters, those limits which he embraces and 
of which he has made stepping-stones for love ? 
Shall we allow ourselves to forget that in coming 
forth as Creator of a creation that is to culminate 
in persons, also in their measure creative, also 
in their measure free, he has set those limits for 
himself ? Is it reasonable that because he is not 
the maker of a puppet-show where all goes 
smoothly, we should neglect or fear to look into 
the noble field of his enduring labour in which 
his Spirit has striven to utter the Word that he 
would have us hear ? 

Our advance towards union with God is no 
mere affair of a departmental business called, to 
distinguish it, religion. Religion is not a pro- 
fession to be followed ; it is the colour, the atti- 
tude and the direction, of a life. The Christian 



86 CHRISTIANHT AND CHRIST 

does his own principles a grievous wrong when 
he narrows them to the affairs of a professional 
or confessional religion. They should apply to 
every kind of knowledge ; they are clues to the 
deeper meaning of everything that we know or 
discover, and there is nothing that we know 
which does not, if we will, enlarge their meaning 
and their range. " As long as I am ignorant 
that the World is mine, the love of God is de- 
fective to me." 

" No end is there, Lord, to thy praises, and 
no count of thy Praisers. 

' What atom is there that danceth not with 
abandon in thy praise ? " 



February 29th. — It may be because men have 
not thought of the Cross in the heart of God as 
" the ground-plan of the Universe," that they 
show so little interest in his life in nature and in 
the long course of the ascent that we call natural. 
I think that it is ; for indeed we do not find in 
our new book of Genesis that the way of God in 
creation has ever been smooth for him. The 
divine Word uttered from the beginning of our 
world seems to have always met with resistance 
even before it met it in us ; though the two 



THE ADVANCE OF GOD 87 

resistances are not the same. Ours is above all 
that of a person over against a person ; the 
resistance of the impersonal to the Creator is of 
another order. It is, I think, of the many orders 
through which life rose. 

I picture these latter orders, though very 
different from ours, as continuous with ours. 
I think I see some foreshadowing in all things 
of the relative autonomy which is personal and 
growing freedom in us men. For the divine 
Poet to embody his poetic Mind involves, surely, 
both a medium to be used and recipients for his 
gifts. And in the medium as in the recipients 
we see the Creator imposing on himself limits 
as he makes for himself means. He stoops to 
win ; he uses limits that he may give in a thou- 
sand varying measures his own power, his own 
freedom, his love, and at last himself, as they 
can be received. So we see him " cribb'd, 
cabined and confined " by the things and the 
men that he has made. In impersonal things 
he too is impersonal ; we see in them life that 
has come from him but not himself. There we 
see this life opposed as well as accepted ; but 
only in man he himself is opposed. Yet the 
Cross of all is borne in his heart, for in all he must 
both strive and suffer. 

Our new book of Genesis telfe a long history 



88 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

of his energy of creative love, and of suffering 
too. That is, it tells it, or should tell it, to 
Christians. I do not suppose that the sorrows 
of Gigantosaurus, with its hundred feet or more 
of clumsy length, when food grew scarce and the 
extinction long threatened came near, were in 
proportion to its size ; they were probably far 
less than those of a starving cat. But such as 
they were, I am sure that God knew and bore 
them. 

We talk of the struggle for existence and the 
survival of the fittest : let us bear in mind that 
in the drama those tragic words imply all the 
actors partake of divine life given to them to be 
their own, but not severed from the Giver. 
It is an appalling, yet a reassuring thought. 
And far more appalling is the thought of 
the pain in the heart of God that we human 
creatures cause, we who share his personal life 
and are sons begotten of his love, not merely 
creatures made. Yet even this is reassuring, 
too. 

It is worse than useless for us to ignore the 
presence of the teeming life from God in nature, 
when we cannot ignore it in ourselves. We are 
parts of nature, joined by indissoluble bonds to 
every other part. We are one with all parts by 
descent and constitution, by breeding and feed- 



THE ADVANCE OF GOD 89 

ing, by birth and death. And it is both unwise 
and faithless to turn away from the rest of 
nature and say that the witness to God is not to 
be found there, because it is and always has 
been a scene of conflict and distress and pain. 
It is a scene also of love and loveliness and of 
the pleasures of abounding vitality and comrade- 
ship, even of loving sacrifice. Dare we say God 
is shut out from that ? The sacrificing love 
that guards the new generation — " the species- 
preserving love " — is both a forerunner of 
the sacrifice men give for love's own sake 
and a witness to the sacrifice of God. If we 
recognize him there in the beauty of things, 
we cannot deny him in the rest, in the 
groaning and travailing of things ; in their wars, 
in their defeats, in their degradation and their 
loss. 

This is not pantheism, though it is panen- 
theism, which is permitted to the firm believer 
in a transcendent God of his nature self-com- 
municating, the supreme Giver and Lover who 
stoops even to the lowest. The God of the pan- 
theist does not stoop. But the Christian's does. 
He is made known as present by his supporting 
power and love in the extremity of created lowli- 
ness ; although he could not be known thus 
were he not otherwise and more fully known in 

G 



90 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

men. In us he has made a wider way for his 
giving, although here too he stoops. 

" I come in the little things, saith the Lord. 

Till by such art 

I shall achieve My Immemorial Plan, 
Pass the low lintel of the human heart." 



March 2nd, — Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, who 
taught me some years ago to respect metals as 
sensitive creatures apt to be fatigued, has been 
giving a lesson more pertinent to my present 
train of thought. In The Times of December 
13th last there was an account of his researches 
into the manner of life in plants. (I keep these 
things by me lest I forget.) He had discovered 
that it was possible to transplant trees without 
injuring them " if the operation were performed 
while they were subject to the effects of an 
anaesthetic ." By his " crescograph " (the bar- 
barous word explains itself) the highest powers 
of the microscope were magnified a hundred 
thousand times. He had been able to show, in 
the depths of an English winter, plants that were 
stimulated to shake off their torpor, and grow 
at a rate which the spot of light of the machine 
indicated by rushing across a ten-foot scale in 



THE FECUNDITT OF LIFE 91 

twelve seconds. This meant, of course, a growth 
of about a hundred thousandth of an inch a 
second. The experimenter could modify this at 
will : " a depressing chemical agent was applied 
and the march of life was slowed down ; a 
timely application of a suitable stimulant revived 
the dying plant and exalted the growth-activity 
to many times the normal rate." Then this 
modern Wise Man of the East points out that 
the rate of growth in plants is a matter of great 
practical importance and the control of it a new 
and valuable instrument for man ; but he delights 
me by saying, as according to the report he did 
say, that " of infinitely greater importance was 
the fundamental unity of life reactions " in plants 
and in animals, which he had been able to show. 
. The spontaneous pulsation in certain plant tissues 
which in animals is heart-beat, " the identical 
effects/' of stimulants, anaesthetics and poisons 
in vegetable and animal tissues, and the " death- 
spasm " which occurred in both — all tell the same 
tale. And a wonderful tale it is, yet one that 
should be confirmed for us by what has come to 
us through other means. 

Life dreams in the plants, walks in its sleep in 
animals, is awake in man — so Bergson says. 
Life is one through all its rising orders of dis- 
play. Awake in us (more or less, for some of us 



92 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

too often dream and others seem always walk- 
ing in their sleep) the many-streaming fountain 
of life plays from the beginning until now. I 
remind myself once more of that continuity 
shown throughout all creation in one real 
difference after another or side by side with 
many others. I look out into the company of 
stars, and among them the eye of my mind 
searches out nebula after nebula charged, each 
of them, to that eye, with the potency and 
promise which has come to life on this little 
earth. 

Out there accompanying the suns there must 
be many earths, and (I think probably) no one 
of them just like ours ; but I am obliged to 
believe that the life which is God's must be 
striving there to manifest him as it strives here, 
and under limitation as it is here. Continuity 
again, and perhaps|differences|that are enormous, 
yet differences in the one life. 

When people talk about life being unlikely on 
any planet except our own, because no other 
planet is in precisely the same state, of precisely 
the same size or related in precisely the same 
way to a sun that is either ours or a duplicate of 
ours, I wonder at their provincialism. A power 
that was expressed in Diplodocus and the 
Ammonites, in Pterodactyls and the Mega- 



MIRACLE 93 



therium, and is now shown in deep sea fishes 
and the Soldanella of the Alps, in crabs and 
gorillas, in the yeast plant and the gigantic 
Sequoia, in bacteria and in man, has shown even 
here an ability and a resourcefulness that should 
carry our minds beyond the province that 
happens to be our own. 

' What is man that thou art mindful of 
him ? 3: What indeed ? After roaming in 
imagination over those vast spaces we may well 
return to see ourselves as motes dancing in the 
divine sunlight. And if we do not see the love 
of God embracing every mote in his creation we 
may well doubt our own place in that love. 
True, man is a " reed that thinks " ; in thought 
he can roam over those spaces ; but who shall 
say that his thinking is not, to the thinking of 
mighty creatures in worlds to us unknown, as 
the sensitiveness of a metal is to ours ? 



March 5th. — Is there anything, I ask you, 
that will satisfy the craving for miracles in 
generation after generation of men who are not 
always " evil and adulterous/' if the marvellous 
facts of man and nature do not ? The craving 
is not always vicious. Although it certainly was 



94 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

vicious in those men of Palestine who " sought 
after marvels as the Greeks after wisdom/' and 
faced the spiritual beauty of truth and holiness 
incarnate in Jesus Christ without seeing it, I am 
inclined to think that in many others it is a 
natural unperverted and unexaggerated desire 
capable of being exalted into a relation with 
truth. We are not made for "a machine-like 
world, correct and dull." We are made for 
adventure, for encounter with new things, for 
the joys of discovery and the wealth of revela- 
tion. Yet there are men who have been trained 
out of that nature ; there are men who, in spite 
of their dry knowledge of the marvels I have 
been writing about lately, miss all their deep 
significance. They have that in them which 
destroys wonder ; they are Peter ^ells for whom 
the glory of God would be an example of in- 
candescence. They would peep and botanize in 
Paradise. 

Most of us crave for marvel ; and in some of 
us the desire is certainly a vice. Now, in our 
crowds, we are superstitious to the core ; and 
religious people, even theologians, who have 
never passed under what Baron Friedrich von 
Hiigel calls " the Caudine forks of science/' or 
through its " bath of purification," sutler from 
the taint and lust of magic which clings to the 



MIRACLE 95 



Christian religion still. When I think of the 
many streams that have converged in Chris- 
tianity and remember how widespread magic 
is, I am not surprised at this. The Golden Bough 
explains it. 

Then again, there is a strong traditional sup- 
port for miracle. The Bible notion of it, for 
which the Old Testament is chiefly responsible, 
still holds its place. There we have neither 
Augustinian nor scholastic ingenuity of com- 
promise ; only the plain religious man's plain 
belief that God makes his laws, issues his com- 
mands, from time to time, moment to moment, 
as a man may fit his conduct to this occasion or 
that. He ordains that water shall most often 
run down hill, and he once ordained that in the 
Hed Sea it should make walls between which his 
people might pass to their deliverance. The 
great interest about a miracle was not the act, 
nor the power in the act, but the purpose and the 
favour shown. God was like a man who could 
with his sword strike one and spare another. 
In his hand all the powers of earth and heaven 
were held as weapons and as tools. The vital 
question was whether he would use them, or 
could be induced to use them, for or against this 
man or that, this enterprise or another. The 
important thing, the interesting thing, was his 



96 CHRISTIANHT AND CHRIS? 

attitude, because it was the attitude of an 
arbitrary power that might be either friendly 
or inimical, useful or calamitous. About the 
existence and the untrammelled range of that 
power there could be no question ; for who in 
fact moved the sun round the earth, who rained 
water on the hills, who brought all things to 
birth or death, to triumph or disaster, but the 
Lord of all ? It was a simple world, where man 
was weak and God strong, God did everything 
and man what he allowed ; it was all a matter 
of power and arbitrary choice ; there was no 
reason why from to-day or to-morrow water 
should not run uphill, or the sun never set 
again. 

Nor is there any reason now, you may say, 
except the reason that is God's. Well, be it so ; 
that is all the reason we have. The reason that 
is God's is, in fact, what we have been studying 
ever since study began. 

Power we felt very early, in its resistance or 
pliancy to our will ; reason emerged later, as we 
sought a law and order in things to match the 
law and order of our own intelligence. We 
invented laws which we believed to be enact- 
ments, laws differing among themselves in rank 
and grade ; and so we made, not discovered, a 
scheme in which one law might be used to super- 



MIRACLE 97 



sede another. To this system, it seemed, God 
himself must bow, although, as we believed, he 
made it. His will, no longer arbitrary, was 
governed by a constant reason. When he 
interfered miraculously he neither laid down a 
new law nor broke an old one ; he only brought 
into new use some higher and more inclusive 
law. So he carried out his particular will for a 
particular case, so he showed his special favour 
or displeasure, brought to light some new mani- 
festation of his will for man ; and this was 
miracle. It was wonderful, it was rare ; but it 
was neither lawless nor unnatural. 

This scheme has broken down. Our scientific 
laws of nature are avowedly made by men ; we 
confess that they are hypothetical and sum- 
marize a narrow experience. They are useful 
formulae, enabling us to frame our questioning 
of nature more intelligently, to deal more easily 
with things, and to predict with good success. 
They are tools, handy tools, our own tools. We 
forge them, fit them to things, use them in 
order to use things. We are quite aware that 
they are neither perfect nor immutable ; that, 
in fact, they are not rarely improved, changed, 
or even thrown away ; we are ready any minute 
to make a new set of tools if occasion demands. 
And the totality of things is fluent in our eyes, 



98 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

though slowly. Nevertheless we do not live in 
an " incalculable miscellany of miracles " any 
more than in a " government department, 
correct, regular and dull." We find that just 
because we can deal with the world, and count 
upon the world, as if it were of a determined 
order, we are able to live as men growing 
towards an ordered freedom. We are established 
by the relative stability of things, strengthened 
and enlarged, kept in the way of freedom, by a 
cosmos we can only bend, and that with diffi- 
culty, but never break. When we think of God 
in his dealings with us, we think of him as 
entering into our finitude, and manifesting him- 
self in his cosmos, according to its conditions. 
We think of him as conditioned by the freedom, 
the order, the reason, he gives to iiis creation, 
as well as by his own freedom, order and 
reason. 

An aeonian change, holding our limits within 
itself as mere fragments of its process, no doubt 
would manifest God's will as our world never 
can. Finite though even that vast change 
must be, entailing upon him still the process and 
the manner of a finite manifestation, it passes 
in its greatness far beyond the grasp of human 
faculty. We men are creatures of a day, of this 
little earth ; we are ephemera of an hour's 



MIRACLE 99 



dance ; the slow sun of that majestic time-span 
stands motionless in the only heaven we can 
see. 

We have changed once more our setting for 
the glories of God, repainted the background 
against which we see the working of his will for 
men. Yet we Christians know him favourable 
or displeased, as well as they knew who wrote 
of the waters piling themselves up and food 
raining down from above the firmament, to help 
his children. How has all this change of setting 
and background affected our notions about 
miracle ? 

It is not true that for the scientific man the 
world is " a closed circle," as Dr. Figgis said ; 
but it is true that he finds profit in treating it 
as though it were. It is not true that it is " like 
a government department " ; yet only on con- 
dition of ascribing to its order at least a relative 
fixity can we predict safely what it will be and 
do, and guide ourselves by our forecasts. And 
because we find our profit on that one condition, 
we believe that for our purposes its order is as 
fixed as it seems. The belief works ; therefore 
we call it true. This is the pragmatism of 
science, which has driven out its dogmatism. 
Yet even that bygone dogmatism did not settle 
a priori the possibility or impossibility of 



ioo CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

miracles. It settled nothing a priori; how 
could it ? The question of meeting a centaur 
walking down Regent Street is a question of 
evidence and experience, as Huxley pointed out. 
No man can say that because no man has seen 
it, therefore a centaur, in Greece or in Regent 
Street, is impossible. Science is not concerned 
with what can happen, but with what has 
happened or is likely or unlikely to happen. So 
the field has always been open to miracle, as far 
as the future and science are concerned. 

With the present and the past it is different. 
For when and if a miracle really happens it 
enters the world of experience ; it becomes a 
part of history and tradition ; it is perhaps 
documentary, a subject for study; it is cer- 
tainly a subject for criticism in the scientific 
way and spirit. It takes its place, for good or 
ill, with many miracles that have not happened ; 
and we have to distinguish it from them, to " try 
the spirits/' lest God be mocked and we de- 
ceived. How shall we distinguish it ? 

How indeed ? And first, what is it ? What 
is a miracle that happens ? Not, plainly, the 
sort of thing a man does when he moves his 
little finger ; although that is an unpenetrated 
mystery. Nor the sort of thing an earthquake 
does when it swallows a province or a city ; 



MIRACLE 101 



although that is wholly beyond the power of 
man, at present. Nor is it as the birth of worlds 
in the star-clouds of space, or their destruction 
there ; although that, probably, is beyond the 
power of man for ever. None of these things is a 
miracle. And the conversion of sinners into 
saints is not a miracle, although it is the co- 
operation of God and man ; and sometimes, in 
our wonder, we Christians call it a miracle, a 
miracle, that is, " of grace." 

Sacramental gifts are not miraculous ; the 
incarnation of God in man is not miraculous ; 
heaven is not miraculous ; nor hell. What is ? 

Here is matter for our attention ; and upon 
the result of our attention, not on any a priori 
judgement whatever, must depend the lasting of 
a reasonable belief or disbelief in the only 
miracles we are now able to consider seriously. 
And whatever we decide, for or against, the real 
world will remain, as always, " coloured and 
changeful, gay with multitudinous laughter and 
dark with many tears." It will be a world 
calling for and winning redemption, a world in 
which love is the only remedy for wretchedness 
unspeakable, a world of mystery, marvel and 
power, a world of the ever new and ever growing 
freedom of man, of the spirit striving against the 



102 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

flesh and the flesh against the spirit. It seems 
that in such a world as this we are in no great 
need of what men ordinarily call miracle, to 
reveal the marvel and the mystery of God, of his 
love, his power, and his will for men, of himself 
as their only redeemer. 

Yet if, with Sir Thomas Browne, I may say 
that my whole life is a miracle of so many years, 
I shall be happy with the word and the thing. 
Then I shall say, too, with Traherne that by the 
very right both of my senses and my spirit I 
enjoy the world. I shall receive it as divine. 
" You never enjoy the world aright," Traherne 
tells us, " till you see how a sand exhibiteth the 
wisdom and power of God." In that way of 
seeing all is miracle ; but it is not the ordinary 
way or the ordinary miracle. " The world is a 
mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. 
It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. 
When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said 
' God is here, and I wist it not. How dreadful is 
this flace ! This is none other than the House 
of God and the Gate of Heaven/ " 

A man in a dream may well ask God to show 
himself, but when he awakes he should see 
nothing that is not revealing God. Are we 
dreamers that we see the world as a physical 
machine, as a pasture for our greed, or even as a 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSAULT 103 

prison for the soul ? If God is not here he is 
nowhere ; let us open our eyes. Teresa told her 
nuns that she asked no great things of them — 
" I only ask you to look/' she said. 



March 6th. — The search for signs and wonders 
in the wrong place is a vice of at least intellect, 
in many Christians still. Our old habit of 
looking for God in the abnormal and over- 
looking him in the normal has not yet lost its 
hold. We made a theology of " the gap " in 
knowledge ; and as one gap after another 
closed under the growing pressure of knowledge 
we thought, and our opponents thought, that 
we had only fancied God had been working 
there. Instead of learning to distrust the whole 
principle of gaps we merely shifted our defences 
from one to another. The course of our history 
makes me ready to believe that our prehistoric 
ancestors found a trial to faith in the fact that, 
in spite of every persuasive offering or magic 
threat to the reigning fetish, or the spirit of the 
biggest dead chief, two and two persistently 
made four. I am of a mind to say that some 
people may have doubted their religion because 
the evaluation of 7r did not succumb to prayer 



104 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

and fasting. Certainly the Copernican astronomy 
tried faith severely, as severely perhaps as 
evolutionary science tried it in the nineteen 
sixties and seventies ; and, I am assured, for 
some Christians tries it now. 

But why ? Always because we do not see the 
normal of nature and man as God's own, through 
which, in which, and by which, he is at work. 
We think that it is not for him to work under 
limits and by means, although both come from 
him and have their very being and continual 
sustenance in him. What is familiar to us 
cannot, we assume, be manifesting God. In 
short, we do not believe in his Incarnation, and 
in his Holy Spirit as permeating ours according 
to his good pleasure and our response. Only 
" signs and wonders," things unfamiliar to us, 
works in which we are used as puppets and the 
world is used as a puppet-show, prove God to 
us. He must depart from the ever marvellous 
course of creative and created life, and catch 
our wandering attention by cutting violently 
across it. 

Just now our newest science, psychology, is 
making great advances. We are learning about 
our minds as fast, I daresay, as we learnt about 
evolving species. And once more a gap is 
closing : we are, at last perhaps, being driven, 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSAULT 105 

in default of another gap not yet attacked, to 
look for God where he may be found, in our 
knowledge instead of in our ignorance, in the 
normal, however various, that is, instead of in the 
kind of abnormal that is not. And once more 
some of us, and our opponents, think that be- 
cause knowledge has invaded the difficult region 
of ourselves there is now no place there for God. 
Where we know, it seems for such people that he 
cannot be. Where we act or think or feel, he 
must be powerless. His field of operation is 
confined to the regions not yet scientifically 
explored. We are like the makers of old maps 
who could write fairy-names across their empty 
spaces. And now, when there are no empty 
spaces on the kind of maps we use, there is no 
room for fairy-names anywhere. There is, 
perhaps, no fairy anywhere, no God — at least 
no God who does anything and counts for any- 
thing in our lives. 

I believe that the root of this trouble for 
Christians lies in our picturing the incarnation 
of God as a sort of sublime conjuring trick by 
which he came to us once in the guise, or rather 
the disguise, of a man. In that picture we have 
a sign and a wonder matching well our intellectual 
vice. And, consequently, we have painted God's 
dealings with us after that likeness. Not " in 

H 



106 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

and as and through " the order in which we live, 
but by breaking across it, God comes to us and 
dwells with us. The supernatural does not 
raise and fulfil the natural ; it displaces it. So, 
when the psychologist conies and shows us how 
intimately and gloriously natural our highest 
experience is, we do not see that he is only 
showing us the beauty of the process by which 
the temporal is embraced and permeated by the 
eternal, the nature of man lifted up in the 
nature of God. We and the psychologist alike 
decide that God has nothing to, do with our 
uplifting. And, obviously, we may just as well 
say that God has nothing to do with the universe 
because we have learnt a little (how little !) 
about our corner of it. 

Yet we Christians have learnt, very many of 
us (most, who have taken any trouble to be 
instructed) to discover God in that corner 
everywhere. We see him in the creative evolu- 
tion of the worlds. Astronomy, physical science 
in general, biological science (except psychology) 
have lost their terrors for most of us. We have 
learnt to set their treatises beside our Bible. 
God who is over all things indwells all things, 
and works with them under the limits that 
creation involves. We have come to see all that. 
And the enemies of Christianity, who thought it 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSAULT 107 

was destroyed each time that Christians were 
dismayed, have seen it rise again among us to 
new strength and a more inclusive life. We 
have come to see God in the normality and 
variety of his everlasting creative work. We 
recognize that it endures only because it is 
supported by his eternal life. So we have ceased 
to look there for abnormal signs and wonders ; 
and our reward has been to find all things full of 
wonder, the whole visible creation one great sign. 
I say " we " have come thus far ; but I know 
that still many of us lag behind. Yet in the 
main neither responsible men among Christians, 
nor the ordinary rank and file, are afraid on 
these grounds. It is different, I am sorry to say, 
even in some otherwise enlightened quarters, 
with the matter of psychology, suggestion, 
psycho-analysis and so forth. This is the new 
enemy (or deliverer, as it seems to me) ; and 
because the principle of a gap-theology has not 
been duly recognized and therefore abandoned, 
we hear of faith weakening under a new attack. 
The last refuge, it appears, is menaced. The old 
intellectual vice, driven from the outer world 
and from our bodies, has found shelter with some 
men in the inmost fastness of their mind. Let 
us hope that it will not survive this latest 
onslaught. 



108 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

We have only to see that God is above all 
most real and most natural, and we find that 
subordinately real and natural processes are his 
ways as well as ours, so far as they are ours. We 
have been misled, I think, not only by the gap 
theology, but by a trick of language. When we 
have said " supernatural M we have allowed our- 
selves to be caught by a word and made to for- 
get that the supernature of God is true nature, 
truer, more real, than ours ; and that the Chris- 
tian faith means that our nature as it is, like 
our " personality " (which is part of it), is 
destined to partake of supernature and to pass 
into it by a truly natural transition through our 
union with God. Nature in us is (as Lotze says 
of personality in us), only a " pale copy " of the 
nature of which it is a promise. There is no 
gulf between the natural and the supernatural, 
only a way on which to travel, the vital, natural 
way. " The whole scandal [of the psychological 
attack] is from the fancy of a Man-God outside 
Nature, moulding and moving things like a 
mechanist. " 

I cannot guess what the next serious attack 
upon our faith will be. Hitherto those of science 
(that is, those engineered by men who use 
science for an unscientific purpose) have ad- 
vanced from far to near, from the sun and stars 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSAULT 109 

to our own bodies, and have conspicuously- 
failed as attacks but have been successful as 
deliverances. We have gained all along the line 
of their advance, although undeniably we have 
suffered badly by the way — through our own 
most grievous fault. Now we are assaulted in 
what seems the last place on this line of pro- 
ceeding, the last place, too, where the mechanist 
God should ever have been thought of. Another 
line may be found ; but we have reached the 
end of this, as, I think, we have reached the end 
of difficulty raised by the literary criticism of 
our documents which has been one agent of our 
deliverance. When this is over and our faith 
stands out purer and stronger, Christ will in his 
marvellous way have subdued by means of it 
the vice he stigmatized in those piercing words : 
" Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not 
believe." 

There will be no room left for the decent 
housing of that vice in the Christian soul. 
But isn't it odd that we should have been so 
long in learning his lesson ? " Have I been 
so long time with you, and yet hast thou not 
known me, Philip ? " 



no CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIS J 

March 8th. — There is another God besides the 
mechanist, who is a serious peril ; indeed there 
are two. Perhaps I ought to say there are many, 
as in practical life there certainly are. But in 
regard to thought and idea and doctrine and 
speculation two of them, with the mechanist, 
stand out chief. One is the Sultan of the Skies, 
the Eastern potentate who is responsible for 
most of Christian men's prayers as slaves and not 
as sons, and for most of the petitions in which 
they ask to have divine ways changed to suit 
then ways by a kindly and omnipotent but 
uncertain Ruler. We inherited him from before 
the birth of Jesus ; and Jesus tried to make us 
disavow him. We might have disavowed him 
if we had not so often disavowed the God and 
Father of our Lord instead. As it is he remains, 
to confuse our religion and make us a laughing- 
or a cursing-stock in the world. 

The other very dangerous God is the one 
" without passions.'"' the impassible God of theo- 
logy in whose heart a Cross has never been. He 
is assuredly not the God of whom Jesus Christ 
is the supreme revealer. We do not recognize 
his lineaments in the divine Face we know, He 
is not the Father we see there. It is not his 
glory of loving that is made visible there, not 
his glory of self-giving and self-sharing. 



FALSE GODS in 

So I am glad to find a Lady Margaret Pro- 
fessor of Divinity saying that the theory of him 
" makes havoc of the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion/' I know it does ; and it has made a con- 
siderable amount of havoc of the claims of our 
Christian faith upon the world. A God so far 
away in heart as this impassible God we cannot 
offer to a suffering world or call upon it to see 
in Christ. He is not there. Better no God at 
all, better worship St. Francis or Pasteur or 
even Augustus Caesar than one who, though 
omniscient and omnipotent, does not care enough 
about us to have sympathy with us. Better con- 
fess a plain Devil on the throne of things than 
call any such being God and ask men to worship 
or — irony indeed ! — to love him and seek to 
grow into his likeness that they may " see him 
as he is." How many unworthy Gods have we 
grown out of, I wonder. But this, I think, is the 
unworthiest of all ; and it is cheering to note 
that he has never been worshipped, much less 
loved. He was made by " theologizers " as an 
element in a theory ; he was never real. And, 
very suitably, nobody has fancied him real 
enough to be adored in good earnest. They have 
adored the divine Son and his Mother and the 
Saints, instead. Or they have kept him on the 
study shelf for study use. 



ii2 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

None the less, as an element in theological 
theory, he has worked untold mischief for both 
the outside and the inside estimate of popular 
Christianity. " What is God like ? " a wounded 
officer asked his chaplain, Mr. Studdert Kennedy. 
The chaplain pointed to a crucifix. And the 
officer said, " I tell you that cross does not help 
me a bit ; it makes things worse. I admire 
Jesus of Nazareth ; I think he was splendid, as 
my friends at the front are splendid — splendid 
in their courage, patience, and unbroken spirit. 
But I asked you not what Jesus was like, but 
what God is like, God who willed his death in 
agony upon the Cross, and who apparently wills 
the wholesale slaughter in this war. Jesus 
Christ I know and admire, but what is Almighty 
God like % " 

That chaplain encountered here the Sultan 
and the impassible God blended into one. He 
wrote a book called The Hardest Part, that is, 
God's part, the really Christian God's part, in 
the welter of the world. Some people dislike the 
book ; it is unconventional, even free and easy ; 
but I value it and so do thousands of other 
Christians. " I don't know or love the Almighty 
potentate/' he says, " my only real God is the 
suffering Father revealed in the sorrow of Christ." 
" How near the God Whom Christ revealed comes 



FALSE GODS 113 



at a time like this ; nearer than breathing, nearer 
than hands and feet, the Father of sorrow and 
love Who spoke through the crucified Son ! 91 

He writes too, this chaplain, of " Nature " 
and its cruelties and imperfections ; and says, 
truly, that only when a man sees in this nature 
of many aspects " God suffering and striving as 
a creative Father Spirit " ; and looks upon all 
things, whether beautiful and glad or cruel, " as 
the fruit not only of God's power, but also of 
God's pain/' is it possible for " the love of 
Nature's God " to grow in his soul. " I can see," 
he says, " the face of Jesus Christ staring up at 
me out of the pages of a scientific text-book 
which tells me the story of the patient, painful 
progress of a great plan." So can I, so do I, 
always. Since I came to see Jesus Christ as the 
Man in whom not only the story of men was told, 
but the story of all that led up to men and all 
that surrounds them, I have interpreted every 
created thing, as well as their Creator, through 
him. 

" All good work is God's work, and all good 
workers do God's will. They are labouring to 
make a world." (Labouring with God, I know, 
who labours with and in them.) " If God does 
not suffer agony because of war, and if He does 
not will that men should live at peace, then I 



ii4 CHRISTIAN ITT AND CHRIST 

cannot and will not worship Him, I hate Him." 
. . . " I would gladly die to kill the idea of the 
Almighty God Who drives men either to cruelty 
or atheism. This war is no mere national 
struggle, it is a war between two utterly incom- 
patible Gods." 

" Utterly incompatible Gods " — that is my 
own point too ; and whether you blend the 
Sultan with the cold-hearted God, or leave them 
separate, the God who is utterly incompatible 
with either of them and whom no ingenuity can 
reconcile with either of them is the God of Christ 
and should be the only God of Christians. In 
him alone our warm, loving, restless hearts find 
rest ; in his heart the Cross of Christ has been 
borne from everlasting, and will be borne until 
his omnipotent love triumphs over all suffering 
for all sufferers. 

If I were inclined to think that the horror of 
war had driven this chaplain off his Christian 
balance I should be set right by his telling us 
that " the Vision of the Suffering God revealed 
in Jesus Christ " first dawned upon him " in the 
narrow streets and suffering homes of an English 
slum." But I am not inclined to think so ; I 
am far too much surprised that other Christian 
men can believe themselves Christian without 
that vision. 



FALSE GODS 115 



Is it too much to ask or to hope that before 
long our Church of England, at least, will face 
courageously and sincerely the problem of these 
incompatible Gods, and choose whom it will 
serve, not only in heart, but in published word ? 
I do not doubt that the service of the heart goes 
where it must and is therefore far better than 
the service of the word. But the cleavage 
between these and the insincerity imposed by 
the statements made in churches and outside 
them by our preachers and teachers are nothing 
short of disastrous. At all costs — and I think 
they will be small compared with those we are 
paying now — let us be sincere, let our public 
yea be as our private yea, and our public as our 
private nay. 

It is all very well for those who have spent, 
may be, years of thought in learning to make 
distinctions in these matters, to trace out the 
perhaps all but blameless history of insincerities 
that nevertheless now shock them to the bone ; 
it is all very well for those who know the falli- 
bility and weakness of human institutions and 
the difficulty there is in not allowing the sacred 
letter to check the more sacred Spirit, the useful 
mechanism to crush down infinitely precious 
life ; but how about the " poor and simple " 
who cannot but be deceived and yet, in an age 



n6 CHRISTIAN ITT AND CHRIST 

of books and newspapers and lectures and clubs, 
are almost sure some day to be violently and 
recklessly undeceived ? Can any one of ordinary 
intelligence be surprised that all the Churches 
are losing, where they have not lost, their hold 
on these very poor and simple (who are of all 
ranks) to protect whom insincerity has been 
kept up, not rarely as a detested duty % A 
lecturer in a Theological College said to me 
gloomily, not long ago, " We are all hedging 
now." Why cannot we trust Jesus Christ ? 
Why need we " hedge " ? "0 thou of little 
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt ? " You can 
hear him saying that to pretty nearly every 
bishop, priest and deacon in the land. 

We ought not to allow any of the clearer 
sighted of these men to be forced x or persuaded 
into an insincerity they abhor ? The causes of 
this disease of the Church are, as we say of 
typhus or smallpox, preventible. For heaven's 
sake, yes, for heaven's sake as well as earth's, 
let us set about to prevent them. We have 
driven out from our pulpits the teaching about 
hell and an everlasting vindictive punishment 
by an angry God ; we laymen have done that. 
And it will be our fault if we do not drive out a 
great deal besides, at least equally (I think more) 
intolerable. The old teaching of hell had a great 



DIVINE JOT 117 

truth in it that was not at first easy to disen- 
tangle ; but there is no truth at all in maintain- 
ing incompatible Gods once they are seen. It 
is that fatal thing, the lie in the soul. 



March 17th. — A few days ago I was writing, 
much stirred, about the suffering God. I was 
perhaps a little unfair to the theological scheme. 
There is nearly always a religious value to be 
detected even in the least satisfactory of such 
schemes. I think there was certainly a real 
value in that one for the men who first devised 
it, and had to set their faces against what they 
called the Patripassian heresy ; and I think, 
too, that some of the value still persists. We 
have to guard against a miserable and impotent 
God ; we have to avoid " hanging heaven with 
crape." We must preserve its joy, and set glory 
and victory there where they should be. I allow 
myself to be sure that the religious intention of 
our theologians was in this respect right ; though 
I am equally sure that they chose a wrong 
means to their end when they gave us the im- 
passible God who " makes havoc of the doctrine 
of the Incarnation." 

We do not arrest the revelation of God in 



n8 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

Christ Jesus at the point where he hung slain 
upon his Cross ; we carry it on through his 
resurrection and the triumph of his ascension. 
The Cross itself is triumphant ; death and sin, 
there, are swallowed up in victory. 

Indeed, if we look into ourselves, into human 
life as we live and know it, we see that God 
become flesh must take up into himself the joys 
as well as the sorrows of men. " Not a God 
alone, apart," I wrote in Faith and Freedom, 
" but a God living our lives with us. Not a 
God who is but victim of and with the world, 
but one who saves it. This God, in and with us 
men, Calvary has shown to us, and in the light 
and gloom of Calvary we may see him everywhere. 
He is our God with us, and sharing his life we 
look beyond even Calvary to a fullness in which 
death is swallowed up in victory and sacrifice is 
crowned. There we discern, although but dimly, 
the joy of love, that joy which sacrifice augments 
even among ourselves, and which in God who is 
perfect love must be perfect too." 

Those words express my theologically un- 
professional mind, and perhaps help to account 
for my delay in trying to do justice to theologians 
in this matter. My justice amounts, I see, to 
saying that they meant to do well and that the 
end they sought was good, though the means 



DIVINE JOT 119 



they chose was mischievous by the way. I go 
as far as to accept what Canon Streeter says 
after telling us to press home boldly " the 
principles of St. Paul, St. John, and Athanasius " 
(which I desire to do) and to recognize that indeed 
he that has seen Christ Jesus has seen the 
Father, who is " essentially one with the Son." 
Then we are able to see God sharing the pain of 
all his sons, of us as well as of our Elder Brother. 
After urging this upon us Canon Streeter goes on 
to say that " orthodox theology was surely right 
in affirming that, though what we see in Christ 
is really divine, yet it is not the Godhead in its 
totality." I accept this, readily. But why was 
orthodox theology so clumsy and destructive in 
being right ? Why, in its theory-making, did it 
flout the oneness of the Father with the Son, 
and set a suffering Son over against an im- 
passible Father ? 

I turn away from the blundering words that 
have made the Incarnation fail to win so many 
of the hearts of men ; and for a blessed change 
I recall what Boehme said (or sang) : 

" In the light of God (which is called the 
kingdom of heaven) the sound is wholly soft, 
pleasant, lovely and pure ; yea, as a stillness in 
comparison with an outward gross speaking 
and sounding. It is as if the mind did play and 



120 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

melodize in a kingdom of joy within itself, and 

did hear in a most entire and inward manner a 
sweet, pleasing melody and time ; yet out- 
wardly did neither hear nor understand it. For in 
the divine light all is subtle, in manner as the 
thoughts play and make mutual melody in one 
another. 

" And yet there is a real, intelligible, distinct 
sound and speech used by the angels, according 
to their own property, in the kingdom of glory. 
The powers of the formed and manifested Word. 
in their love desire, do introduce themselves 
according to the property of all the powers, into 
an external being, where, as in a mansion, they 
may act their 1 love-play, and so have somewhat 
wherewith and wherein mutually to play and 
melodize one with another, in their wrestling 
sport of love. 

" God. who is a Spirit, has by and through his 
manifestation introduced himself into distinct 
spirits, which are the voices of his eternal 
pregnant harmony in the manifested Word of 
his great kingdom of joy : they are God's 
instrument, in which his Spirit melodizes in his 
kingdom of joy ; they are angels, the flames 
of fire and light, in a living, understanding 
dominion. . . . 

" We are all strings in the concert of his joy ; 



OMNIPOTENCE 121 

the spirit from his mouth strikes the note and 
tune of our strings. Therefore God became man, 
that he might repair his glorious instrument of 
praise, which would not sound according to the 
desire of his joy and of his love, He would bring 
again the true love sound into the strings ; he 
has brought the voice which sounds in his pres- 
ence again into us ; he is become that which I 
am and has made me that which he is, so I may 
say that in my humility I am in him his trumpet 
and the sound of his instrument and his divine 
voice." 

That is better. " There is joy in heaven over 
one sinner that repenteth," over one string 
newly brought into the harmony of God. And 
there is eternal joy in God because love eternally 
triumphs. But for me this glory is best trans- 
lated in terms of that human experience in which 
sacrifice brings joy in proportion to the great- 
ness of its gift of love, a joy unhindered by the 
soreness of its pain. 



March 25th. — When I look from the earth to 
the stars that I see with my body's eyes and 
beyond to those unnumbered stars that only 
the eyes of my mind can reach ? and then tell 



122 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

myself that, if machine-like power is the only 
power they express, 1 know that all their might 
would be unable to conquer my soul or that of 
any child of man. Then I worship God with 
new reverence, because he subdues me and wins 
me by another power that is indeed omnipotent 
and always conquers where it is discerned. 
Both my heart and my mind discern that power, 
too, beneath and with all others. 

No man sees love as it is but is won by it. 
Any man may resist such power as science dis- 
covers in those wheeling stars, power which can 
be measured in foot-tons that at worst only 
crush. A man that is a man will always stand 
up against that sort of power when it is directed 
against his soul ; it rouses what we call the 
devil, and should call the God, in him. " the 
superlative Bounty of God ! [This is Traherne.] 
Where all power seemeth to cease, He pro- 
ceedeth in goodness. ... He seemeth to 
have made as many things depend upon man's 
liberty, as His own. When all that could 
be wrought by the use of His own liberty 
were attained, by man's liberty He attained 
more. ... By His own liberty He could but 
create worlds and give Himself to creatures. 
. . . But ... to make them fountains of actions 
like His own (without which indeed they could 



OMNIPOTENCE 123 

not be glorious) or to enjoy the beauty of their 
free imitation, this could by no means be, with- 
out the liberty of His creatures intervening." 

Yet we have thought of God's omnipotence in 
terms of the sort of power that was only the 
sum of all conceivable mechanical forces, and 
could never conquer liberty. We have prayed 
for that sort of power to be used on our behalf, 
or we have prayed that it might not be used 
against us. And all the while we have called 
ourselves Christians and read, I suppose, the 
Gospels, yet not remembered that we have 
never seen or felt or heard of a trace of that in 
the dealings of Jesus with men. All his power 
works in love. It is love that gives him power 
over us. He gives himself, spirit penetrating 
spirit, and wins our spirits in a return of love. 
He conquers by the magic beauty of his love ; 
by nothing else. Even his wisdom (if wisdom 
could be separate from love) and the splendour 
of his justice would not win us, although either 
might convict us of our folly and of our sin. 
We love because he first loved us. And we 
are able to give ourselves to him because he has 
filled our hearts and minds with the sense of 
his giving himself to us, with the beauty of his 
self -giving. So we are won, not otherwise. And 
so we may win our brother-men, not otherwise. 



124 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

" The divine omnipotence/' Pringle-Pattison 
says, " consists in the all-compelling power of 
goodness and love to enlighten the grossest 
darkness and to melt the hardest heart. e We 
needs must love the highest when we see it/ " 
God, then, is omnipotent ; but only because he 
is inexhaustible, unwearying, most lovely Love. 
There is no power that can overmaster love ; 
only blindness to it can do that. " No man can 
sin that clearly seeth the beauty of God's face." 
We can blind ourselves to love and its beauty, 
we cannot look upon it and resist it. But we 
have our divine liberty and we can resist any 
other kind of power open-eyed. In fact, a power 
that has any likeness to the forces of material 
machine-like things is powerless to touch our 
souls. I wish we would always reckon with this 
truth of all experience when we talk about the 
omnipotence of God and complain that he does 
not do this or that which a Supreme Sultan 
might, if we cajoled him enough. That is not 
God's way ; his way is Christ's. 

How is it we so often forget that God is 
really to be known in Christ and that he who 
has seen Christ has seen his Father ? How is it 
that we make a magnified Jupiter omnipotens 
regum rex for our God, whom we cannot possibly 
see in Christ ? And how is it that we forget our 



OMNIPOTENCE 125 

own nature and experience and so fail to see 
that Jupiter cannot conquer us ? 

Perhaps we do not know enough about our- 
selves. Assuredly we do not know enough about 
Christ Jesus. I think that if all the preachers 
and teachers of the Christian religion would 
make a vow not to say anything about God for 
five years that they could not see for themselves 
in or through Jesus, and would with the utmost 
sincerity say everything they could see, some 
of us would begin to learn what the Christian 
religion really is. It would be an extreme 
measure, I know ; but the preachers and 
teachers would return to the rest of their know- 
ledge with a new understanding of it, and their 
hearers would be ready to listen as they never 
listened before. 

Three days after last Christmas (I remember 
this well) there were collections in all our 
churches for the starving children of Central 
Europe ; and some members of many con- 
gregations, who had been keeping the birthday 
of the Christ-Child, the Saviour and Lover of all 
the world, refused to give. I heard of one saying, 
while still inside the church : " Let the little 
brutes die ! " But I have also heard of preachers 
who taught their congregations to worship, not 
the Saviour and Lover of all the world, but the 



iz6 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

God of Battles who commanded his favoured 
people to " smite Amalek and utterly destroy all 
that they have and spare them not. but slay 
both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox 
and sheep, camel and ass/' As is the teacher 
so are. it seems, the taught. Blind leaders can 
lead the blind into a ditch. And because we 
have not yet decided on the God whom we will 
serve, we have these blind leaders, these teachers 
and the taught. 

The God of Battles is certainly not incarnate 
in our Lord Jesus Christ, nor is his power one 
with love. We shall never worship the God and 
Father of Christ as he is shown in him, until we 
have utterly cast out our false Gods, our Jupiter, 
our God of Battles, our Mechanist and all the 
rest whom Christ does not reveal. None of these 
can win us, draw us to himself, purify us and 
conquer our hearts. None can show us the way 
of peace and eternal life, and of none is his 
kingdom the true desire of our hearts. But 
every one strengthens in us the " ape and tiger," 
the greed and lust and fear and pride that poison 
life in us. For every one is the mirror of our- 
selves in some such evil guise. We have made 
our Gods after our low likeness. It is Christ 
only who has shown thQ true God as he is and 
called us to look upon his likeness. 



OMNIPOTENCE 127 

Can we wonder that clear-eyed men turn away 
from our false Gods and from a Christianity 
which, they suppose, sets up their worship ? 
Very many of them do not turn away from Christ. 
They honour him, like that officer who stirred up 
Mr. Studdert Kennedy with his questions about 
God. Through their clear sight they see his 
splendid courage, and a spirit nothing daunts. 
Like Shelley, they see, perhaps, a revolutionary 
of love, " a Promethean conqueror " who would 
set free the world in an extremity of his self- 
giving, one not unlike " the stormy and mys- 
terious Personage " of St. Mark's Gospel, a 
destroyer of all false Gods. Certainly they do 
not see, as many Christians do, the flimsy senti- 
mentalist of hymns and stained-glass windows, 
" the conventional Saviour, with the gentle un- 
individualized face." And if you can only con- 
vince them that in him they thus admire they are 
seeing your God made known in the character 
that is truly his, the Christian's own God — well, 
you will surprise them. They have not been 
taught that Christians really do believe God is 
like that. 

How are we to convince men that we Chris- 
tians believe in the God who is seen in Jesus 
Christ ? That is the great question for us, after 
we have learnt to believe in him. There is that 



128 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

other question to face first : how are we who 
call ourselves Christians to learn to believe in 
that God and in him alone, to worship him, to 
give our hearts and minds and strength to him, 
and so travelin his only way of life and ours ? 
How are we, in short, to learn to believe in 
omnipotent love, and listen to Love uttering, 
giving forth, love ? 

" The height of love is as high as God " ; 
Boehme says — " it brings thee to be as high as 
God himself is, by uniting thee with God. Its 
greatness is as great as God : there is a latitude 
of heart in love which cannot be expressed ; it 
enlarges the soul as wide as the whole creation 
of God. This shall be experienced by thee, 
beyond the compass of all words, when the 
throne of love shall be set up in thy heart. Its 
power supports the heavens and upholds the 
earth ; its virtue is the principle of all principles, 
the virtue of all virtues. It is the worker of all 
things and a vital energy through all powers 
natural and supernatural. It is the power of all 
powers, nothing being able to let or hinder the 
omnipotence of love, or resist its penetrating 
might/' 

Always, always, the splendour, the strength, 
the winning beauty of love conquers men. They 
have only to see it : and if a man sees Christ in 



THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 129 

his beauty he does see love — love in power, love 
with perfect justice, with that justice which has 
eyes. 



April 1st. — A well-known man of letters, one 
of religious mind, tried to convince me that 
" the symbolism of the Cross/' as he called it, 
had lost all meaning in the present day. That 
is, for the day (I must take it) in which he spoke, 
which was before the war. Whether the war 
has made any difference in his opinion I do not 
know. But it has made many a difference else- 
where. Still, I share his opinion if by " the 
symbolism of the Cross " I am to understand, 
and the men of the present day are to under- 
stand, one attached exclusively to Calvary as an 
isolated event. Otherwise I do not agree with 
him. 

We have discovered almost in our sleep that 
our world has not only stretched out far in space 
and time but has taken on a new wholeness in a 
continuity of process we have been compelled 
to recognize. Therefore all the outstanding 
peaks which mark the range of our religion for 
us must be seen as what they truly are, signs of a 
continued base on which they stand, signs 
showing us where it lies. All the sublime 



130 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

moments of the revelation of eternal life in the 
eternal Christ must tell us of its universal extent. 
So the Cross stretches its arms across the world 
and through the worlds. We see it in the far- 
away mists of time and in the deeps of eternity. 
Calvary is the clear announcement of an eternal 
truth manifest in part through all time. We 
discover, at last, the Cross in the heart of the 
Eternal Father. Just because we are able to 
see God in Jesus Christ lifted up on Calvary we 
know the universal significance, power and 
efficacy of the Cross on which he hung, a " young 
man crucified/' 

All the great sayings about the Cross have 
either taken on a universal sense, or have lost 
their meaning for many of us. If my friend, the 
man of letters, has not become convinced of the 
universal sense, it may well be that in spite of 
the war he still thinks as he thought before. 
But I assure myself that thousands are gaining 
that sense, and with it a symbolism reaching to 
the uttermost stars, where, may be, or most 
likely, there is no more knowledge of what God's 
ways are with us than we have of his with them. 

Nor, in our little day, 
May His devices with the heavens be guessed, 
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way 
Or His bestowals there be manifest. 



THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 131 

But in the eternities, 
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear 
A million alien Gospels, in what guise 
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear. 

Here indeed in Mrs. Meynell there is the 
universal sense ; and she is a faithful daughter 
of Rome. To this extension of the Cross, to a 
truth embracing the created universe and en- 
shrined in eternity, all Christians and the world 
must come. 

I am reminded now, by Mrs. Meynell, of a son 
of Rome who wrote of the universal significance 
of the Cross, but especially of its life and death 
pertinence for us as we are now. And although 
he wrote before the war his words are made only 
the more weighty by it, and by all that has hap- 
pened and is happening socially and politically 
in consequence of it. " This is the meaning of 
Christ Crucified — man agonizing for goodness and 
truth even unto death, and thereby fulfilling the 
universal law of God in Nature and in himself. 
If the mentality of the age is insensible to the 
older and ruder symbolism of this idea it is 
perhaps more sensible to the idea itself, for never 
were men more conscious of the vacuity and 
senselessness of any other view of life but that 
which gives value and significance to its suffer- 
ings. . . . Hence, instead of Hell-fire, I should 



132 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

preach the hollowness of the self-life in and out, 
up and down, till men loathed it and cried : 
Quis me liberavit ? and then I should turn to the 
Christ-life, not only of Christ, but of all Christ- 
like men, and make its reality, solidity, eternity, 
stand out stereoscopically." 

That might be Donald Hankey, but it isn't. 
Such men and women are now, I am deeply 
thankful to say, of every Christian Communion. 
This next quotation, too, is like Donald Hankey 
but also unlike him : — " I still think . . . that 
Christ Crucified is the best and surest Gospel to 
reawaken a faithless world, or rather a world that 
has outgrown faith's short-clothes. But instead 
of beginning with the dogmatic Weltanschauung, 
and deducing the practical life from faith in that 
same, let us begin by preaching the Life and 
winning faith in that Life directly, and only 
indirectly in the Truth it implies. Then let us 
unfold these implications, already believed and 
loved, and show that Life to be a self-conforma- 
tion to a world of eternal (though mysterious) 
realities and facts. After all, we know by 
experience that the mere example of Christ and 
the Saints, and of the great and good both of 
history and fiction, draws men to their imita- 
tion ; and has a suasive force in se apart from all 
the theory implied. Indeed we believe doctrines 



THE GLORY OF EASTER 133 

only because of their bearing on life, and as 
guiding us how to live. Much more immediately 
therefore do we believe in a life or way." 

The Cross, the Life, the Way — can they be 
preached with the energy and vividness which 
men once threw into preaching about hell-fire ? 
Can " the worthlessness of self-life " be shown 
in picture-language as Jesuits and Calvinists, 
and not only they, used to show the tortures of 
the damned ? And can the life of self-giving, 
the life which is Christ's, lived in the following 
of his way, be made to look as attractive, as 
lovely and delightful, as the joys of heaven, to 
which it most surely belongs ? 

We shall need a new order of preachers for 
this. We are ready for them, 1 think. The 
fields are white for their reaping. 



April 3rd — Easter Eve.— Not in telling us men 
that after death we pass through a gate into some 
other manner of life does the glory of Easter 
consist. I can imagine an amount of evidence 
gathered together strong enough to convince 
any reasonable man of the brute or the scientific 
fact. Indeed I have known many reasonable 
men convinced by the evidence wilich has 



134 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

already been amassed. I have known reasonable 
men convinced, too, by philosophy. But there 
is certainly no glory revealed to them by any 
mere rational, sufficiently grounded, opinion 
they have reached. There is no secret, no 
mystery, of life revealed, no power shown, no 
destiny portrayed. Man as he is might go on 
indefinitely as the man he is ; worlds like this 
might succeed worlds ; the immanent process 
of evolution might go forward indefinitely, bear- 
ing us with it into some Utopia of the well- 
behaved, well-grown, altogether admirable man 
of earth. What St. Paul would name the merely 
" psychic " manner of life might never end, 
might continue through innumerable worlds. 
Only not to die. except to this earth, does not 
mean an entrance to eternal life in God. 

This is one of the reasons why men of our 
vigorous and oppressive western nations have 
so little desire for immortality, such a sur- 
prisingly small amount of interest in the matter, 
such a surprisingly feeble desire not to die. If 
life is only the continuance of earthly life, if 
there is no other prospect for us through inter- 
minable spheres, then we are most miserable. 
And the wiser we are the more clearly we see 
that we are miserable. We desire glory, although 
we may not know the secret springs of our desire ; 



THE GLORT OF EASTER 135 

and we see, as in the Cave of Shadows, that 
which we do not really see. Therefore one thing 
is made known to us— our discontent. There is 
no glory in mere going on. Worlds like ours, 
even carried to perfection, are no better than 
some limbus of the soul ; unless, in ours and in 
all, the power of the Highest overshadows all. 

To live a million years, a million million years, 
and still go on, is not glorious ; an amoeba, with 
fair chance, might do the same. The drive of 
life from amoeba to man, and through the wide 
expanse of his animal kindred upon earth, 
touched glory nowhere in its course until it 
came to man. Then it touched glory, by the 
spirit that was able to welcome Spirit ; but it 
could not make it manifest. Not by the natural- 
istic drive of life in man but by the power of the 
Highest, the brooding of the Spirit over him, 
the life of God coming to him to be received by 
the life of God within him, is glory given and 
made known. 

I think yet again of the long history of man- 
kind and of the many ways in which, sunk in 
our Cave of Shadows, we have sought after the 
light of God and tried to decipher by it our true 
selves. I see the Brahmin sick at heart of 
material goods, longing after the divine knowledge 
that has no place for vanities and no need of 



156 CHRISTIJXITT AXD CHRIST 

earthly forms: desiring the knowledge that is 

intuitive, direct, that penetrates all truth be- 
cause it is itself all truth. By self-mastery in 
the intellectual way. by self-devotion in the 
ceremonial way. by self-sacrifice to an ideal of 
purity set over him in an iron rule, he would 
immerse himself in the impersonal divinity over 
and beyond all worlds, be absorbed in its imme n- 
sity and hiov: perfectly at last, with an un- 
changing knowledge which is one with his being 
and with the being of the Whole. Here there is 
something higher than our- reasonable conviction 
of going on, and higher than the rational mannei 
of going on : but there is no Easter, no iovful 
resurrection, and no transfiguring of earth i o 
the life of earth. 

The Buddhist, too. seeks like the rest. But 
for him there is less to seek. He has no supreme 
God ; his goal is that he may ceas: to 3eek g n 1 
thus attain divinity and its enlightenment. If 
he can cease from desire he himself will be 
divine, for divinity is. above all else, the absence 
of desire, a godlike calm. He will reach the state 
: perfection in losing all particularity. And for 
this he must abandon self and the world ; 
because these, even self, are of the iHnsion the: 
bet: n into renewed life, and darkens that 

unchanging light which is beyond all life. Where 



THE GLORT OF EASTER 137 

is there joy, I ask myself, in this scheme of man's 
despair ? How naked and barren is that en- 
lightenment which shuts out the desire of even 
the purest heart, the heart that might see 
God! 

For Islam there is the going on of earth and 
of the earthly man, an after-life which wearies 
out hope in men of the spirit. A materialistic 
heaven won by submission to the divine decrees, 
decrees of an arbitrary fate, and by an unwaver- 
ingly systematic orthodoxy well suited to the 
unwaveringly earthly man, would be hell to 
those who have caught a glimpse of the glory of 
God in the face of Jesus Christ. Even Islam has 
men who look further, and transfigure its faith 
by a mystical vision of secrets that it hides. 
The Sufis are witnesses to spirit and to the glory 
that must come by spirit ; they are witnesses to 
an Easter they do not know. Everywhere there 
is desire ; everywhere there are shadows of 
which Easter brings the substance that fulfils. 
And here, among Christians, for whom yester- 
day the whole world stood still, silent, waiting 
at the gate of death, the glory of the Highest 
and the power of the Highest are not seldom lost 
sight of and forgotten. Here Easter brings no 
message to many Christians except the message 
that over there, beyond that gate of death, there 



138 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

is another world, a world of Heaven and Hell 
and Paradise and Purgatory, a world of the 
limbus patrum and the limbus infantum, a world 
that is not eternal but only does not end. And 
this poor message some of us are satisfied to 
proffer to men who are capable of God and hunger 
for his life. 

It is not the message of the Man who died on 
Good Friday, not the message of the Son of God 
to his perishing brothers ; not the Christian 
Good News. He is no example of an earthly 
life carried through this world to that ; he is the 
exemplar of eternal life, of the natural world 
and all its natural life raised up by the Spirit of 
God, taken into his glory. 



Easter Monday, April 5th. — I remember seeing 
an account in a newspaper of the many ways in 
which Londoners might " mitigate the dullness 
of Easter." All the pleasure-giving resources of 
civilization were brought to bear on this difficult 
problem, and even they, it seemed, were over- 
taxed and must fall short. That is, unless the 
word mitigate is the newspaper equivalent to 
overcome. 

Who are these people who have forgotten 



PERSEPHONE AND CHRIST 139 

Persephone and have not learnt Christ ? Who 
are these whom a great city deprives not only of 
Spring and its religion, but of the better part of 
their own life and its highest aspirations ? Do 
we need the face of earth, I wonder, to draw us 
towards God ? 

Easter, some say, is a Pagan festival. Good ; 
for it is more. Our Easter is not only of the 
aspiration and symbolic fancy of men ; but of 
their history and fact. That is one direction in 
which we leave Paganism behind us. We carry 
the symbolism of Persephone to a fulfilment 
beyond its own power : we take myths that are 
ideal, the stuff of dreams, and show them realized 
in concrete life. Our Christian myth is built up 
in living stones. 

Again, we bring Paganism to a realization 
beyond itself, in that the life culminating at 
Easter is life which God has brought within the 
range of human effort, by an example and a 
promise for us all that " in Christ shall all be 
made alive/' There is nothing in Paganism 
that does not fall far short of this ; and yet 
there is prophecy, longing, and inspiration of the 
Spirit that fills the world, and goes before men 
in the way of their desire. Hunger of the heart, 
desolation of spirit, as well as much else, were 
vocal in those myths of " the Creed outworn " 



140 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

that we have abandoned, or rather have tran- 
scended and absorbed. And the sense of uni- 
versal kinship, and of the beauty for ever born 
anew in all things, was at work, surely, in those 
men who embodied the drama of the Spring in 
a drama of heroic life. Our people of the city, 
for whom Easter is dull, and Spring has no 
flowers, Demeter no " golden-throated trum- 
peters " calling them to rejoice once more over 
the beauty of earth — these people of ours are a 
problem and a shame. 

They have warped and deadened, it seems, the 
natural man, so that he no longer hears the 
summons of his kin, feels their blood in his 
veins ; or touches by an inner sense the common 
life, as the thrill of that life takes possession of 
the soul. All this is nothing to him. Persephone 
is nothing to him ; as she is not even a fit subject 
for a revue. We pay dearly for our great cities, 
our thronging crowds who cannot even make a 
hero or a god, except perhaps of some champion 
boxer. The fertile earth is hidden away out of 
their sight, the strengthening sun brings them no 
message of a resurrection from the dead. We 
pay dearly, we who know of these things. How 
must they pay, who do not ? 

They would lose much, yet far less, if they 
were not heathens still, although without the 



PERSEPHONE AND CHRIST 141 

heathen faith and stir of hope, the vision that 
expressed itself in myth. If they had the 
Christian vision and hope and the faith of Easter, 
their life would be uplifted from the natural 
plane which they live on now and yet belie. And 
the rest would be loss, but loss without degrada- 
tion such as theirs is now. For these men who 
have no vision, no faith, no hope of eternal life 
here or elsewhere, are degraded, many not by 
their own fault, from the due estate of men 
capable of God. They are capable but frustrate. 
They have the mind of the natural, the " psychic" 
man, not the mind of the Lord, whose life is 
their rightful heritage. And they pervert the 
natural man, poison him, crush down his natural 
claims, and silence the voice that would tell him 
at least something of what he really is. 

Happily the Spirit has many ways ; and 
nature has many ways. Happily pain and 
sorrow, death, the call of need and wretchedness, 
the call of country, even at times the call of 
an admiration of true heroes, summon these 
men, as earth summoned the makers of those 
resurrection-myths. And they answer, often, as 
they answered in the Great War. The love of 
children, sympathy in suffering, the impulse of 
the Saviour hidden in all men, may bring them 
near to the resurrection morning. Some day 



142 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

their eyes will open upon it, and they will 
behold him whom, having not seen, they yet 
have loved. 

So I hope and believe, for God's ways are not 
ours, and his arm is not shortened by what we 
have done. Yet we have done ill, and we shall 
sutler for it. Our cities and nations and policies 
have, for some great part of their foundation, 
the greed that builds up hell and would ruin 
heaven. Whether we ourselves do or do not 
share that greed, we must suffer. When any 
member suffers all members suffer with it ; and 
we are of one body with those men who have 
neither an Easter nor a Spring. 



April 6th. — The absence of any desire for a 
share in the one body of religion and worship is 
the special disease, it has been said, of religion 
in our day. We set, so we are told, no value on 
a Church or on its common cultus and its sacra- 
mental rites. Yet if the saints and the mystics 
are able, sometimes, to " live eternal life in the 
midst of time " without that aid, ordinary men 
have amply shown that they are not. And for 
the most part saints and mystics do not try — 
certainly not for long. As Baron Friedrich von 



COMMUNITY 143 

Hugel says, in his Eternal Life : "If man's 
spirit is awakened by contact with the things of 
sense, and if his consciousness of the Eternal 
and Omnipresent is aroused and (in the long 
run) sustained only by the aid of Happenings in 
Time and in Space, then the Historical, Institu- 
tional, Sacramental must be allowed a necessary 
position and function in the full religious life." 
The argument holds good. Even Quakers have 
their institutional bonds and social religious 
supports. 

Long ago, when my scientific agnosticism had 
been displaced by something like a panentheism, 
I went to Benediction at the Brompton Oratory. 
I remember now the thrill of emotion that came 
over me when I found myself one of a great 
gathering, all of whom seemed to be recognizing 
the union of spirit with matter, worshipping God 
seen in the little things whereby we live. Yet I 
knew I was not really one with that gathering. 
I knew that the words in which I should express 
my conviction and account for my worship 
would not be approved by the priest at the 
altar, and that he would press upon me a 
whole scheme of religion, or rather of theology, 
that I could not and probably never would 
accept. 

In this I was not singular. Many a man far 



144 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

more settled in conviction than I was just then, 
better established in a sacramental outlook on 
the world, has been and is being made to feel an 
alien in the Christian Community, in any Chris- 
tian Church, in the same way. 

It seems to such men a grievous thing that 
while the indifferent man and the conventional 
man can easily be of that Community, of any 
Church, they themselves are treated as heathens 
and publicans. The bruised reed is often broken, 
the smoking flax is often quenched. And small 
matters are allowed sometimes to become 
matters for exclusion. It was by the help of one 
of the greater bishops of the English Church, 
then Bishop of London, that I found at last, 
when I was both willing and ready to submit to 
much, an entrance to the Church without 
sacrificing truth. And I know that there are 
members of the Church now who would cheer- 
fully expel me for no more than I have 
shown in these pages. It is not a pleasant 
thought. 

We shall have to wait for the day, but I am 
pretty sure dawn is breaking. The War has done 
a great deal for us in showing to the Church its 
failures and the alienation of the great mass of 
men. The evidence gathered up in that signifi- 
cant book, The Army and Religion, brings accusa- 



COMMUNITY 145 

tions it cannot ignore and, I am glad to be 
assured, is not ignoring. 

We cannot do without a Church. Indifference 
to it, repudiation of it, are passing phases. Man 
is incurably religious and as incurably social ; 
and men will inevitably come, through trial and 
error, to demand the outward and visible sign 
of spiritual communion between men and God 
which only a Church can present. " A Chris- 
tian's belief in the Church is . . . the concen- 
trated expression of his belief in the dependence 
of human society on God/' 

You may say that we are far from any such 
belief or demand on a great scale. It may be 
so ; but at least the trend of our new knowledge 
is that way, and change goes quickly nowadays. 
Reformations move at double, treble pace. I 
believe that if the Church will do for the new 
knowledge what St. Paul did when he fought 
the battle of the Gentiles, and what Thomas 
Aquinas did when he " baptized into Christ " 
the learning of Aristotle, the world will be 
astonished by the effect upon multitudes of men 
and women now either half-hearted members 
of the Church or outside its bounds. 

Has the Body of Christ lost its ancient 
assimilative power ? If it has, it has lost its 
life. But I do not believe that ; I believe it will 



146 CHRISTIJXnr AXD CHRIST 

arise once again, throw oft its fetters, its apathy 
and fears, and go forth, as it has so often done 
before, powerful as an army with banners. 



April 8th. — The greatest of Christian symbols 
is only a piece of bread. Has ever a more per- 
plexing paradox been set before the world I Xo 
crown, no glory of jewels and gold, no sword of 
judgement, no symbol of the lightnings of a 
throne ; nothing hierophantic. imperial, conquer- 
ing or condemning ; nothing rare, or precious, 
or imperishable ; no adamant or deathless 
asphodel ; only the co mmo n food that must 
be renewed from day to day. is grown in any 
field, ground in any mill, baked and eaten in 
every cottage and palace by the men and women 
and children of all nations. This is the sacred 
universal symbol in Christendom of the King 
of kings and Lord of lords, the only Euler of 
princes. It is incredible, yet it continues to be 
true. It cannot mean what it seems to mean in 
the eyes of those who only look on ; or it could 
not be believed. 

For us who believe, it is significant of that 
which we see with other eyes, and know within 
our hearts — it signifies universal and incarnate 
Love in power of life, excluding neither prince 



COMMUNION 147 

nor peasant, bond nor free, wise nor unwise ; 
seeking out the wanderers and the lost, calling 
sinners, and all that sorrow and are heavy-laden, 
to his mighty arms. As his people need bread, 
so they need love, and so they need him, their 
Saviour and their life. " This/' he says to them 
all, " This is my body, given for you," and he 
gives his very self to them by the bread, and by 
his love, to be as love in themselves and as 
bread from heaven bringing to them heavenly 
life. Can we wonder that they worship him ? 
Are they not worshipping God in his plenitude, 
God given to them that their life may be full 
and ever more abundant ? 

It is love that wins the world ; it is love that 
is bread from heaven and brings eternal life into 
the world. And the great procession of the 
Church along the ages has failed to win the world, 
only because it has so often carried on high some- 
thing other than love, and has tried to conquer 
something other than the hearts of men. 



April 9th. — Bread and wine ; this bread and 
wine — what are they ? I ask the men I know, 
and I have their answers. Let me set those 
answers down and look at them. 



148 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

A series of dynamical equations covering not 
only bread and wine but all things. 

Electrons, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, 
calcium, phosphorus — and so on. Or, some gases, 
and a pinch of dust. 

These do not content me. I cannot keep life 
going on equations of any kind ; nor on elec- 
trons. I may feed myself with chemical elements 
as carefully as I please, and die of starvation. 
There is something wrong here. Neither bread 
nor wine is for me what these men say. As to 
this bread and wine — 

The staff of life ; that is better. All bread is 
the staff of life ; and without water, such water 
as is in that wine, even bread would not avail 
for life. I must have both, or perish ; I need 
food and drink to keep me alive. Poetic sym- 
bolism, then, comes nearer truth than science. 
It includes more significance for me, more of my 
experience of the meaning of things, draws 
closer to life's immeasurable inclusiveness. 

If I listen to the poet I shall hear, in his many 
golden tongues, of marvels hidden in bread and 
wine, in corn and the clusters of the grape. He 
will show me their beauty, their strength and 
joy ; the glory of the sun mated with the dark 
earth and bringing forth its concealed life. He 
will show me Demeter, Apollo, Dionysus — all 



COMMUNION 149 

the gods — the lightning shafts of Zeus, rain upon 
the fields, day and night, seed-time and harvest, 
earth brought to creative power in man, in the 
power of his spirit, in his mastery over mind, 
over body, over all magic of the world of Gods 
and men. These things and more he will show 
me in the bread and wine. These and far more ; 
for I cannot fathom the soul of the poet, or 
bring his inspiration down to my measure of 
thought and words. 

Yet, small as my measure is, little as I see or 
can say of what the poet would show, he gives 
me greater truth than the men of science or 
of common everyday thought and use. From 
within me there comes a response to him I cannot 
find for those others. They do not stir me, call 
me to life, as he does. They exclude so much — 
beauty and joy and the deepest wonder ; even 
life itself and its mystery. I can learn of the 
truth of bread and wine from the poet better 
than from men who, for want of his inspired 
vision, see too little in those simple things, even 
for me. 

But it is plain that I need not abandon science 
because I accept the poet's deeper truth. Bread 
embraces within itself for me not only poetry 
and poets, but the mathematician, the physicist, 
the chemist, as it includes their truth. When I 



ISO CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

look at it I see that everything these men say 
about it is true, in a place, for a purpose ; above 
all, for the men. And I see the men themselves, 
their mind and will, their interest and attention, 
met together here, in a piece of bread and in the 
wine, met together and meeting me. 

Of course any earthly thing that would sup- 
port life would serve to unite them and their 
ways of truth ; but not, for example, a lump of 
stone. That would of necessity leave out the 
most important truth of all. So I would have 
bread, the simplest food, yet of the widest 
application, as my rallying point of thought — a 
fitting symbol to my mind of these many ways 
of thought, these many ways of seeing life and 
things. Bread and wine might be my centre, 
where poetry and prose should become one, man 
and his dwelling-place, the sun and stars, the 
round world, even the disc of earth and neigh- 
bouring Olympus with its Gods. I might be 
content to be a Pagan poet, or at least a willing 
disciple of some Pagan poet ; were it not for a 
greater marvel — were it not for this bread and 
wine. 

If I ask another man, of a different mind, if 
indeed, I ask myself, what is this bread and wine, 
the answer surpasses even that of the Pagan poet 
in its inclusion, and in the depth and height of 



COMMUNION 151 

the mystery to which it points. " The bread 
which iv e eat, does it not represent a fellowship of 
the body of Christ ? " " This bread is no longer 
common bread/' 

" No longer common bread " ; yet even com- 
mon bread contains earth and the fullness thereof, 
men and the thoughts of men, their symbolizing 
Gods, the life, the beauty and the marvel of the 
worlds, What does more than this ? What 
more is there to be done ? " Does it not represent 
a fellowship of the body of Christ ? " And the 
answer of the whole Church of Christ to my 
question is that this bread and this wine, which 
are no longer common, do represent his Body 
and his Blood given and communicated to us in 
our union with our fellows and with him. 

We are a long way from earth and the body of 
earth, our own or his. For his Body and Blood 
are spiritual not carnal ; and our spirits are 
upheld by that divine food, strengthened for 
the support of the body of flesh and of the life 
dependent on our spirit. We have taken into 
the meaning of bread and wine not only earth 
and the body, the natural and the sensuous man, 
scientific men and poets ; but religious men and 
men of the spirit throughout the world and in 
every age. We have even taken into it God ; 
whose life feeds the life of all his universe. There 



152 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

is nothing more, nothing left out, nothing 
that can be added to this symbolic sum of 
things. 

So, and for this reason and on this account, 
every kind of objection may be brought against 
our Christian Sacrament. It is linked with all 
things ; and you may choose this link or that 
as your point of attack. You do choose accord- 
ing to your bias ; your choice is, in fact, an 
accident of your bias, for all possibilities lie 
open. 

We are materialistic, we who believe. Cer- 
tainly ; earth and things earthly are taken up 
in our belief . We believe as firmly in our bodies 
as in God, although with a different end in view. 
But if you mean that because we believe in our 
bodies and in earth we do not believe in our 
spirits and in God, you show your bias. 

We are superstitious and absurd. Bread is 
bread, wine is only wine ; matter is real, spirit 
is unreal. We are forgetting Kraft und Stoff in 
our spiritualistic fancies. It is nonsense to- say 
that any bread can be made other than common 
bread by saying words over it ; what magic 
have words, any words ? 

Yes ; we are certainly superstitious. We add 
to Kraft und Stoff a whole world that transforms 
them. We take those things that are only 



COMMUNION 153 



things, and make them vehicles of spirit and life. 
We discover the true magic of words infused 
into them by men who dwell in God and in whom 
God dwells. We see that human life includes all 
and makes all after its pattern, that the highest 
life in man permeates the lowest and uplifts it. 
We have these " over-beliefs " ; and we even 
count men poor who are without them. If this 
is superstition we are superstitious. But may 
not our superstition be also truth — greater than 
yours, including yours ? 

Other men tell us that our Sacrament of 
Bread and Wine came to us from Jewish Sacri- 
fices or from Pagan Mysteries, or from further 
still, and worse. It is true ; but what then ? 
Do we desire to shut out any part of the religious 
life of man, any witness to his aspiration, his 
need of redemption, his need of God and his 
longing after him ? On the contrary, we would 
include all ; and we rejoice in testimony which 
may prove to men that we have come not to 
destroy but to fulfil. 

These simple things, this bread and this wine, 
convey to us God, and all the life of men. We 
are made partakers in that which saves us from 
absorption into self, and from the loss that must 
end in death and loneliness. The divine Spirit 
is given into us by the Body it informs. We 



154 CHRIST 1 AN HT AND CHRIST 

share the " Fellowship of the Body of Christ/' 
that Fellowship which should be manifest to 
all the world, not only in symbol and sacra- 
ment, but as the kingdom of God " on earth 
as it is in heaven/' 



April 11th.— How is it that the scientific 
world, in spite of differences and entire freedom 
to differ, is a real and visible fellowship ? I 
believe that, among men following a great pur- 
suit and moved by a passionate interest, it is the 
only example which the earth presents. How is it 
brought about ? Why are there national, ecclesi- 
astical, religious, commercial, industrial and 
social dissensions and antagonisms, while the 
scientific men of all countries form one body ? 
There is no such thing as an English or French 
science, or a Liberal or a Conservative science. 
There is no fury of competition between sciences. 
Of what other great interests or pursuits can you 
say the like ? And again I ask how it is brought 
about ? 

The answer turns out to be plain, easy, deeply 
significant. The men of the scientific mind have 
in regard to their sciences, though often enough 
in regard to nothing else, the spirit and temper of 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SCIENCE 155 

the child which Christ demands of those who 
would learn of him the science of eternal life. 
They have the innocent eye for relevant truths 
of fact, let their prejudices and passions be what 
they may in other matters. And they have 
learnt at last to keep their intelligence frank 
and free in its dealing with the interpretation of 
fact. They are humble before their own experi- 
ence and any other man's experience of the nature 
they are investigating, if they are humble no- 
where else. When they have found what seems a 
valid law, or interpretation, of twenty relevant 
facts, and they find a twenty-first for which it is 
not valid, that law or interpretation has to go. 
It is displaced either by a new one valid for the 
twenty-one facts, or by a time of suspended 
judgement and renewed investigation. Self- 
interest, in self-constructed hypotheses, is never 
allowed to stand for long in the way of revising 
or reconstituting them as occasion demands. 
The true man of science allows himself no idols. 
His God is truth. Moreover he has learnt that 
the scientific Sabbath is made for man, not man 
for the Sabbath, and that it is to be held sacred 
only while it serves man, but then tenaciously. 
Henri Poincare, declaring that the doctrine of 
the earth's rotation is not " vrai " but only 
" commode/' yet replying to his critics, E pur si 



156 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

muove, gave a vivid illustration of the scientific 
mind. No man experiences the rotation of the 
earth ; and, strictly speaking, nothing that is 
not experienced is true ; therefore it is not true 
to say that the earth rotates, it is only con- 
venient. But it is very highly convenient. There 
are many truths of experience that cannot be 
interpreted without it ; there is not one relevant 
truth it does not interpret. Consequently 
Poincare says E pur si muove ; and every man 
of science agrees with him. 

In the spirit and temper of the child, in the 
conviction that the " Sabbath " (of whatever 
kind it may be) is made for man, in personal 
disinterestedness and devoted interest in truth, 
in an indomitable hope, men of science are follow- 
ing the way that is Christ's, though with a tem- 
poral aim. And they have made by the way the 
one great fellowship of the world. 

In a letter to Charles Kingsley which Huxley 
wrote and Dr. Glover quotes, he said : " Science 
seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest 
manner the great truth that is embodied in the 
Christian conception of entire surrender to the 
will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little 
child, be prepared to give up every preconceived 
notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever 
end Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. . . . 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SCIENCE 157 

I have only begun to learn content and peace of 
mind, since I have resolved at all risks to do 
this." 

When I think of the contrast between the 
customs of Christians and the customs of men 
of science, my heart first sinks within me and then 
my courage rises. Science, after all, as it is now, 
is a new thing. Only modern science has this 
character of faith and hope and charity. It is a 
new example. I go further, it is a new leaven at 
work in our meal, working after the fashion of 
the kingdom of heaven. It is both a new lesson 
and a new training in the manners of fellowship, 
and in the divine, the only, way in which true 
fellowship may be attained. And I believe in its 
power and its mission for the world and for the 
Church. 

How long, I wonder, will it be possible for 
men among whom science penetrates, with its 
frankness, its sincerity of act and speech and 
heart, to say in church and teach children what 
they do not believe and have no business to 
believe ? And how long will they be able to 
make of statements for which they have no 
adequate foundation, statements which not only 
are not vrai but are not even commode, barriers 
separating them from other religious men ? 

How long too will it be before the Church 



158 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

learns, like science, to look out for new truths, 
to welcome new interpretations, to be ready to 
respond to a summons coming from without its 
own bounds ? Surely, to be always vigilant, 
alert to the Spirit's moving either within or 
without those bounds, is the fitting attitude for 
the Body of Christ. 

I recall something I cut out of The Times (I 
have forgotten when) and I set it down here as a 
witness both for and against the Church in this 
great matter : — 

" To the Christian disciple and to the Chris- 
tian Society by direct counsel and by many a 
parable Christ taught the lesson of vigilance. 
Alertness, promptitude, daring, adventure, perse- 
verance — these qualities He demanded of His 
followers. 

" But the Church has not been rich in this 
virtue. It has often slept through its Lord's 
coming. It has been too late when the hour of 
crisis came. After the storm is over, the Church 
interprets its meaning ; during the long intervals 
of quiet between the fierce outbursts of spiritual 
life, it studies the past, it praises the wise few 
who were ready ; but it does not prepare for 
the next crisis. It keeps a generation behind in 
its spiritual history. It imagines that nothing 
more will happen at all comparable to the past 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SCIENCE 159 

comings of the Lord. Those ages are for ever 
past, it believes, when like heated metal the Life 
ran into new moulds. So it fails to keep its 
present vigil. Even down to the present time this 
is true ; after ages will understand the spiritual 
meaning of this age ; who will say that the 
Church as one living society was watching and 
ready when the hour struck in 1914 ? 

" The world, as it presents itself to faith, is a 
place of surprises and wonders unutterable ; at 
any turn of the road the watchful eye may hit 
upon some strange glory. The children of the 
kingdom should have the look of wonder in their 
eyes, for they are children still and children live 
amid wonders ; they are always asking ques- 
tions ; they cannot afford to miss one clue ; they 
cannot sleep one hour, for He may come at 
evening, or at midnight, or at cock-crowing, or 
in the morning ; He may come along the common 
and dusty roads of life ; He is always waiting 
to be detected by vigilant eyes ; and He offers 
the supreme prize to those who watch ; to them 
He gives Himself. 

" But such a bearing to the future means 
clearly the policy of an open mind. The watch- 
ful Church knows that there is light still to 
come ; and is ready to welcome the light. The 
man of science searches the heavens with sleep- 



160 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

less eyes ; he will follow the truth whither it 
leads him. With the same fearless eyes the Church 
should search the fields of its own inner world. 
If the Lord of Truth comes along new ways, He 
will not find such a Church sleeping ; but the 
noble hosts of science have much to teach the 
Church. They have kept their vigil ; nor have 
they missed the clue by which they can push 
back still further the bounds of mystery ; and to 
the heirs of the Christian Faith their devotion 
to truth brings the same counsel : f Watch there- 
fore, for ye know not the hour/ " 

" Watch M — look for that which comes ; do 
not rest in the past, take it up into the present, 
let the present and the future both have their 
part with it, that it may be new every morning 
with the newness of the divine Spirit at work in 
all. Can we do this ? Can we thus live eternity 
in time, as science does not ? There is a differ- 
ence between religion and science ; can we show 
it when we have learnt from science ? If we do 
not, what will the world say to us ? 



April 12th. — The habit of making the word of 
God of none effect through our tradition is very 
old and deeply rooted. For the moment, to-day, 



EXPERIENCE & INTERPRETATION 161 

I am concerned mainly with the process of getting 
rid of it which I see going on. 

That process is going on very roughly just at 
present. Some people might call it a reductio ad 
absurdum brought about by the habit itself. 
There are men bent on making that habit 
ridiculous by the thoroughness with which they 
are carrying it into expression. They are- doing 
good work. I remember receiving a post-card 
from Father Tyrrell on which he had written 
" Long live Pius X ! " Pius X was a thorough- 
going habit-monger of tradition and so did 
service to the cause of truth in the Roman 
Catholic world. The Church of England now 
has benefactors of the same kind. 

Other people might call the rough process of 
amendment rather a modern substitute for perse- 
cution, a trial by which the good metal of 
religion is being purified from the dross of pre- 
tence, conventional acceptance, delusion, lies. 
It depends where you look. There are habit- 
mongers ; there is a great sifting. But the chief 
cause of the mischief that is being attacked is, 
I think, established false opinion about revela- 
tion ; and I am not sure that the attack, in 
either or any of its forms, goes to the causal 
root. 

Scientific men in old times made exactly the 



1 62 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

mistake that religious men often make now. 
When certain astronomers refused to look through 
Galileo's telescope at Jupiter's moons, because 
if Jupiter had moons there would be more than 
seven planets, they made the word of God of 
none effect through their tradition. The " per- 
fect " number ; the circle, the " perfect " 
figure ; anything that Aristotle or the Scriptures 
had laid down ; these sufficed to blind them to 
plain truths of fact. And the very virtues of 
these men, as well as their vices, combined to 
sustain tradition and reject truth. Loyalty as 
well as personal or corporate vested interests 
worked for the blindness of the aveugles volon- 
taires ; and for an arrogance often pretending 
to be the defence of faith. Science itself had to 
pass through its " bath of purification " before 
it could seek truth and ensue it as it does now, 
in the spirit and temper of the child, with cleansed 
flesh and the innocent eye. Only after that 
cleansing did it learn to distinguish between 
what is true as matter of experience and what is 
valid as means of interpreting, or between this 
latter and what is invalid. 

Religious men as a body have still to learn 
that lesson and carry out its consequences. The 
" original or birth sin " of theology is said to be 
its making fact conform to theory, not theory to 



EXPERIENCE W INTERPRETATION 163 

fact. Consequently religious man is all too often 
made for the theologian's Sabbaths, not those 
Sabbaths for religious man. 

But it is the facts, the truths of religious life, 
that are revealed ; the theological interpretation 
of them is not. That is the work of the reflective 
mind upon the facts. The parallel with science 
seems to me exact. Science has its interpreta- 
tions, its laws, its schemes, hypotheses and 
theories. But it has learnt to refuse them wor- 
ship. It has learnt that they are not revealed 
truth, like the facts of our experience of nature ; 
and that it is only revealed truth to which men 
must be absolutely submissive, to which they 
must pay unwavering honour. Religion too has 
its manners and degrees of interpretation, the 
work of the reflective mind embodied as its 
theology. And a theological doctrine may be 
taken as comparable with a scientific " law " or 
with a theory ; or with this or that hypothesis 
of different degrees of probability. It may be 
valid, " commode" but it is not in any of its 
varieties a revealed truth. It may be worthy of 
very great respect ; it may be as valid and as 
valuable as the scientific statement of the 
rotation of the earth ; but it did not come to us 
from any Sinai as divine writing on tables of 
stone. We wrote it ourselves, no doubt by 



164 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

power given us, but in our own fallible way. 
And if we are inclined, sometimes, to call a law 
or doctrine, either of science or of theology, 
" self-evident," let us remind ourselves that we 
are only citing a subconscious generalization 
from a number of experiences, which we have 
summed up in a scheme. There may be other 
and relevant experiences, which cannot be 
summed up thus and would destroy our generali- 
zation and its " self -evidence " at a stroke. For 
these we should always, and humbly, be on the 
watch. 

God reveals to us facts of " spirit and life," 
truths of spiritual experience. He does not 
reveal either our own or theological interpreta- 
tions of them any more than scientific interpreta- 
tions of other facts. A law of science and an 
established doctrine of theology seem to me to 
stand on the same footing ; and the footing is 
not by due prescription always safe. Indeed, 
as a matter of present fact, many of the doctrines 
of theology are very unsafe ; because they have 
not yet passed through the searching trials to 
which the laws, theories and hypotheses of science 
have so far been exposed and which many of 
them have so far survived. 

What we need is a new spirit and a new 
temper in these affairs of religion ; precisely 



DISCOVERT AND REVELATION 165 

those characters by which science has won its 
way to our unfaltering trust. It seems a pity 
that we cannot learn to seek that spirit and that 
temper without being forced towards trying 
them, as we are being forced now by the failure 
of everything else. But such has always been 
a good deal of the way of our education. We 
seem to be dull-witted sons of God ; but we are 
very young as yet, very new in life. It is not 
many years — as years count in secular affairs — 
since we were climbing about in trees. 



April \Wh. — I think of the many things Christ 
Jesus did not teach either his disciples or the 
multitude who for the brief time of his popularity 
followed him. He did not teach them that the 
world was not made in six days or that the 
Sabbath had nothing to do with a day's rest for 
God. He left them believing that David wrote 
all the psalms going by his name ; he seemed to 
share their opinion. He also seemed to believe 
that certain epileptics and hysterics were pos- 
sessed of devils ; at all events he did not correct 
the common mistake of the time about them. 

But here I pause and ask myself whether even 
if he would he could have corrected those mis- 



1 66 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

takes. Is it possible to drive information into 
men who are not ready for it ? And would it 
have teen of any use to tell them which among 
the psalms David had not written or to teach 
them to diagnose epilepsy and hysteria ? Further, 
would it have been of any use for Jesus to know 
about those things himself, seeing what his 
mission to wayward and sinful men really was ? 
And I answer i( No " to all those questions. 
True knowledge is a whole that grows as a whole, 
and men make no good use of disconnected facts 
that cannot be fitted into the integrity of their 
minds. Unless those facts either cast light on 
the general content of the mind or are lighted 
by it and therefore welcome, they may just as 
well not be confessed. 

Jesus may indeed have shared the ignorance 
and the beliefs of his brothers concerning such 
matters. I think he did. But neither ignorance 
nor erroneous beliefs in regard to history or 
science could hinder his great mission, or impair 
in the very least his power to reveal man as he 
should be and God as he is. Those days in 
Palestine were of the fullness of time for that 
supreme revelation. The men of Palestine were 
as well able to perceive Love and Wisdom 
incarnate as we are or our descendants will be, 
and it was Love and Wisdom incarnate, with 



DISCOVERT AND REVELATION 167 

their message and their eternal promise, that 
Christ then offered for men's discovery. Only 
humility and good will were needed, then as now, 
for that. 

For me it is true, as some one said, that 
" these very ' limitations/ as we call them, of 
the earthly life immensely increase the spiritual 
force of the appeal of Christ." That he shared 
the intellectual ignorance of his fellow-men does 
but enhance the splendour of his spiritual 
eminence over them. Besides, in that obvious 
triumph of eternal over temporal values, of 
wisdom over mere scientiae, as Swedenborg calls 
them, he sets for ever the key of all our valua- 
tion of human attainment. Men of ample good 
will and humility, men of the loftiest spiritual 
vision, may be almost impervious to truths of 
the order of science, only because they come as 
alien elements asking to be placed where no place 
is felt to be empty and ready for them. In 
regard to the eternal life of men, that highest 
order of their life with which Christ Jesus was 
abidingly concerned, these truths of another 
order are all but unimportant. That is to say, 
their chief importance lies in the spiritual re- 
action they provoke. And the only important 
spiritual reaction they can provoke depends on 
a man's ability and opportunity to see them as 



168 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

they truly are, and to reject or receive them, 
conscious of what he does. 

It would have been worse than useless then 
for any Jew to be told the truth about David's 
psalms ; either he could not have taken it in or 
it would have destroyed his intellectual integrity. 
But it was not useless to tell him that although 
certain rules of conduct had been laid down by 
Moses and were supported by that great tradi- 
tional authority, yet a new authority of truth 
made manifest was able to say something 
different by which Moses stood corrected. What 
that new authority declared, what living truth 
declared, could meet and in certain cases did 
meet with a vital response. 

I think of the cave-men in the Valley of the 
Vezere, and I do not see them capable like those 
Jews of discovering incarnate Wisdom and Love 
displayed by God in man. I see them capable 
of perceiving only a mere ghmmering of either 
in the claims of incipient family life. And I 
remember the great and pathetically unsuccess- 
ful Pharaoh Akhenaton, worshipper of one God 
in a polytheistic world, husband of one wife and 
doing her public and scandalizing honour, friend 
of captives and slaves, enemy of war and of 
oppression, a poet of the soul and God and a 



DISCOVERT AND REVELATION 169 

lover of the natural beauty for which his people 
had no eyes, teaching nothing and leaving 
behind him no trace of his enlightening. Prac- 
tical persons now speak of him as the fanatic 
Pharaoh who failed to sustain the imperial policy 
of Egypt and nearly brought her to ruin — which 
is true. Contemporary practical persons, as soon 
as he was dead, repudiated his principles and his 
God, and took suitable vengeance on his sacred 
mummy for his attempt to lead them in ways of 
eternal life. If he had not been Pharaoh, if he 
had been a carpenter, they would have taken 
vengeance earlier, no doubt. " Thou that killest 
the prophets, and stonest them which are sent 
unto thee, how often would I have gathered 
thy children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wings, and ye would 
not ! " 

There must be a fullness of time before either 
eternal truth or the truths of mere scientiae can 
be received by men. So the revelation of God 
and the concurrent discovery of him grow as 
time goes on, in the real time men always live 
through the passing " clock-time/' Age after age 
men have believed to their loss that perfect know- 
ledge had been won — knowledge of God and of 
created things. But now, I think, there has 
come a new fullness of time and a revelation 

M 



170 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

about revelations and discoveries, and so about 
the ways of the Spirit of Wisdom with men. St. 
John saw it coming — " I have yet many things 
to say unto you/' 

A gradual, a very slow, process, a continuity 
with the emergence of real differences of which, 
I do not doubt, this earth will never see the end, 
either for our race or in any one man — this is 
the process of the revelation of God in Christ as 
we discover it. There is many a real difference 
still to come, and many a conflict, I am sure, 
about its coming ; many a new fullness of time. 
But I allow myself to think that our own fullness 
of time is a very great matter indeed. I would 
say that it is bringing us into a new experience 
of the living work of the Spirit of Christ, and a 
new distrust of our traditional theorizing about 
it. We are learning how well able we are ix) 
invent falsity and distort truth. We are dis- 
covering the idols we have made not with our 
hands but with our minds. We are finding out 
how often we have taken those images of sacred 
things for reality itself. 



April 16th. — Why was our Lord Jesus for ever 
talking passionately about the kingdom of 



THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 171 

heaven, exhausting figure and parable in the 
effort to tell men what it is and their need of it ? 
Why does St. John translate that language about 
the kingdom into a language of eternal (that is, 
divine) life and love and light in the eternal 
Christ manifest in Jesus, and through him prof- 
fered to all men ? Because these two, the king- 
dom of heaven, and the gift of God " which is 
eternal life," are the same, and without their 
vital reality man's life is vain, cut short, empty, 
made desolate. God, the most real Life, given 
to man, to any man who will receive him, the 
Life of God come to men, Spirit to spirit, in 
order that men may become Gods, as Athanasius 
bravely puts it — this is the Gospel, the Good 
News of the kingdom of God in men and around 
them. 

All the rest is dream-stuff compared with that. 
And Jesus says so : " He that saveth his life 
shall lose it '" ; the kingdom of heaven is like 
" treasure hid in a field ; the which when a man 
hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth 
and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that 
field." Repent then, change your minds, become 
as little children, begin all over again ; seek, 
give away, forsake, that you may buy that 
treasure. 

I observe what has happened to science since 



172 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

it changed its mind and began all over again as 
often as there was need ; I have seen the treasure 
it has amassed. Scientific treasure has its own 
reality and must be sought as reality demands 
to be sought. The principle of seeking and 
finding all real treasure is the same ; a man 
must submit and give, if he is to receive. 

After all, that is what we should expect. 
Everything real in its degree partakes of God and 
makes some part of his demand on us. But it is 
only when we come to understand, and still more 
to feel, the demands of persons, that we begin 
to understand and feel much of the demand of 
God. Then we begin to see the magnitude of 
the demand he makes upon us in order that we 
may be able to receive from him the continuance 
and the uplifting of our natural life in his, the 
fulfilling of our destiny. Then we see, or may 
see, why Jesus is so insistent about the kingdom 
of heaven and the one way to it ; and is so 
neglectful of the authorship of psalms and the 
diagnosis of diseases ; and of other things that 
often seem to us even more important, such as 
the doctrine of himself which the Church calls 
Christology. 

" Hilaire Bourdon " says wisely that the faith 
the Church holds as its religious treasure is not 
an intellectual system, not, that is, a theology, 



CHRIST, THE WORLD'S WAT 173 

nor even a history of facts ; it is the highest 
life of the soul." It is a " truth or trueness of 
the will to God, as of the needle to the Pole, the 
trueness of man to his deepest nature and highest 
destiny, the trueness of him who is the Way, the 
Truth and the Life, through whom alone men can 
come to the Father. ' This is the Catholic Faith 
which except a man believe faithfully he cannot 
be saved ' ; for to believe in a way is to walk in 
it ; to believe in a life is to live it ; to believe in 
Christ is to appropriate his Spirit and be filled 
with it. Christ therefore, rather than Chris- 
tology, is what has been committed to the 
Church to keep and to impose upon men — a 
living spirit, rather than a system of ideas." 
And Christ in us — God the most real — is the 
kingdom of heaven in us and embracing us. 



April 17th. — " Let intellectual and spiritual 
culture progress, and the human mind expand, 
as much as it will ; beyond the grandeur and 
the moral elevation of Christianity, as it 
sparkles and shines in the Gospels, the human 
mind will not advance." So Goethe, after long 
experience. 

I would read " Christ " for Christianity ; and 



174 CHRISTIANITT AND CHRIST 

I should carry his " grandeur/' may be, farther 
than Goethe carries it. If I were able I would 
carry it as far as St. John did. Unless I can see 
in Jesus of Nazareth the eternal Christ, the 
creative Word of God, and so link hini with the 
mere jelly-specks from which we all have sprung, 
I cannot connect his life with mine. I cannot 
otherwise relate the One with the Many except 
by some intellectual trick I can easily see 
through. I have seen his glory and it fills the 
world. 

So it follows for me that as Christ is the world's 
glory, that glory to which it shall come, he is the 
world's way, and truth and life, the world's secret 
and at last its revealing. 

In the lower limits of creation it is not really 
God whom we perceive ; it is life come forth 
from him to do its own work, sometimes failing, 
sometimes succeeding, sometimes rising, at others 
falling. Yet God is with it always or it could 
not be sustained. He is with the life he gives 
away. But in man he is not only with that 
given and sustained life, side by side, as it were ; 
he is there (again as it were) face to face. He 
looks into eyes where he seeks recognition, his 
heart calls for hearts that shall respond. Here 
on earth our eyes see, even the best of us, " as 
in a mirror darkly " ; and yet it is true that 



CHRIST, THE WORLD'S WAT 175 

compared with those living orders through which 
our life passed before it came to be owned by us 
in personal possession and awareness, our order 
now stands, figuratively yet really, face to face 
with God. 

So it is that we can look back on our long 
history and discover him throughout, in the 
rising tide of life that overflowed all lower limits 
to reach ours. Creation becomes in some degree 
intelligible when personal life, however un- 
developed, is reached ; if growing personal life 
is used as a clue to it. Looking on the world as 
a whole from above downward, and foreshorten- 
ing its history, we can see that plainly. Man is 
the clue to the amoeba ; the amoeba is no clue 
to man. 

We are able to see, too, that life is not likely 
to be exhausted or made complete by our attain- 
ment here, or by the order of our purely earthly 
and temporal fashion of living. Its work in us 
would be stultified by that. " I am come/' the 
inexhaustible Christ says, " that they might 
have life and that they might have it more 
abundantly." And he does not mean the animal 
life, or human life on a superior but still animal 
plane. He means to introduce within us an 
exalted order, as much, we may say, above the 
human animal order as that is above the order 



176 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

of the jelly-speck, perhaps more. The issue is 
clear : shall we admit him into our lives, confide 
ourselves to him, look to him as Master of our 
lives, and so begin to live eternal life in the 
midst of time ? Or shall we not ? 

True, we are often quite unaware of any such 
fatal decision to be made ; yet we make it. Life 
does not stand still for us because we are ignorant 
of its issues, or are careless of them ; and we 
may be borne upon its upward stream, aware or 
unaware. Or we may be either fighting against 
it or lying stranded on its banks ; also, perhaps, 
unaware. Of one thing, however, we may be 
sure : unless life is carrying us on, it is dying 
within us. And we are able to know what it is 
doing if we choose. 

So it is with the Church of Christ, just as with 
the men who should be his. We can say, as we 
look at- it, " Here it is alive in Christ and shows 
his vital Spirit ; here it is parted from him and 
its spirit is that of self-guarding, self-seeking and 
death/' And the Church, too, is able to know 
what is happening hi it, if it chooses to know. 
If it elects to be aveugle volontaire — but it cannot 
do that, it never has done that, for long. 



THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCH 177 

April 19th. — To-day, thinking of the Church 
I am reminded of the " Koinonia," the fellow- 
ship of early Christians which came of the 
Pentecostal inflowing of the Spirit of God. And, 
naturally, I turn from that brief glow of enthusi- 
astic love to God and the brethren, a very 
poetry of souls, to the process of transmuting 
through which it passed, you may say, into the 
prose of an instituted Church. 

It is useless to look enviously now on a scene 
that can never be revived, beautiful though it 
was. The flowing life of the Koinonia affords no 
pattern we can set ourselves to follow. It had 
no pattern. We are not a select band, newly 
inspired with a supreme ideal, on fire with love, 
and bound together not only by love but by the 
.pressure of an uncongenial world. Our world is 
not interested in us, but we are more interested 
in it than the early Christians were in theirs 
except as a mission field ; and we find it not 
wholly uncongenial, not as uncongenial, usually, 
as we ought to find the worldly world. We are 
also too widely differing and too numerous and 
scattered to make a company in which every 
man is every other man's close friend. Besides, 
the early enthusiasm of a spiritual movement 
changes. Once a body for it is instituted, the 
vital movement either becomes confined and 



178 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

checked or ceases ; and fervour is either in some 
degree cooled or is exhausted. Organization had 
to be, in those days. The Koinonia could not 
be maintained in the rapidly growing Christian 
world. So the Christian Fellowship merged into 
the Christian Church ; and the dependence of 
its members on continued individual inspiration 
was in great part gradually replaced by a body 
of doctrine communicable to all. " As feeling 
cools doctrine is deposited like crystals/' And 
crystals may be passed from hand to hand. 

Much was lost when for the bond of love 
bonds of institutional custom, law, deductive 
reasoning, authority and obedience were sub- 
stituted ; though much also was gained. Men 
must reflect, they must have doctrine, because 
they are thinking beings. They must organize 
their common religious life because they are 
social beings. But whereas the Spirit strives 
always to carry us beyond the letter of any law, 
our minds tend to seek in vain through worship 
of the letter a short-cut to life in the Spirit. 
Nothing but the Spirit's fervour communicated 
to us keeps us safe from that deception of the 
short-cut. Our native laziness and selfishness 
make us long for it. And this psychological 
fact of experience has left its mark throughout 
the history of the Church. 



THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCH 179 

" If we place ourselves at about the year 200, 
about a hundred or a hundred and twenty years 
after the apostolic age . . . what kind of a spectacle 
does the Christian religion offer ? 

6 We see a great ecclesiastical and political 
community, and side by side with it numerous 
* sects * calling themselves Christian, but denied 
the name and bitterly opposed. . . . All its tenets 
are of the widest significance ; and together 
they embrace a profusion of metaphysical, 
cosmological, and historical problems, give them 
definite answers, and supply particulars of man's 
development from the creation up to its future 
form of existence. . . . The living faith seems to 
be transformed into a creed to be believed ; 
devotion to Christ, into Christology ; prophecy, 
into technical exegesis and theological learning ; 
the ministers of the Spirit, into clerics ; the 
brothers, into laymen in a state of tutelage; 
. . . the ' Spirit ' becomes law and compulsion. 
At the same time individual Christians are in 
full touch with the life of the world, and the 
burning question is, In how much of this life 
may I take part without losing my position as a 
Christian ? " 

Thus Harnack writes, with his acquired pre- 
possessions showing through. But who dares 
deny the substantial accuracy of what he says ? 



180 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

We have to recognize, as " Hilaire Bourdon '* 
has pointed out, that the Church as an organized 
institution was no more made on the day of 
Pentecost by divine Fiat, than the world was 
made in the six days of Genesis by a similar 
Fiat. The Ghurch, like the world, grew by 
creative evolution, and we may see God and 
nature working in the creation of both. 

" Had the Church," Harnack says, " at the 
beginning of the third century been asked in 
tones of reproach, ' How could you recede so 
far from where you began ? to what have you 
come ? ' it might have answered : ' Yes, it is 
to this that I have come. I have been obliged 
to discard much and admit much ; I have had 
to fight — my body is full of scars, and my 
clothes are covered with dust ; but I have won 
my battles and built my house ; I have beaten 
back polytheism ; I have disabled and almost 
annihilated that monstrous abortion, political 
religion ; I have resisted the enticements of a 
subtle religious philosophy, and victoriously 
encountered it with God the Almighty Creator 
of all things ; lastly, I have reared a great 
building, a fortress with towers and bulwarks, 
where I guard my treasure and protect the 
weak/ This is the answer which the Church 
might have given, and truthfully given." 



THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCH 181 

Was not God working with men in this, striv- 
ing, doubtless, with them too ? It was a great 
spiritual as well as an institutional, an intel- 
lectual, and a moral achievement — let us re- 
member that. But we have paid a heavy price 
for it, because the faults which accompanied and 
furthered it were perpetuated with it. The 
Western Church, by the means so triumphantly 
used, succeeded to the political eminence of the 
Roman Empire. The Pope, King and Pontifex 
Maximus, ascended the throne of the Caesars, 
and, as Harnack says, the words " Christus 
vincit, Christus regnat, Christus triumphat " came 
to take on a political sense. The rule of the 
Church seated at Rome became one of law, 
rationalistic reasoning, and authoritative force ; 
not of love, liberty, and that " drawing " of 
which Jesus Christ is master. 

In the records of history we find skeletons of 
dead religions, traces of religious experiments 
that have failed, as in the geological record we 
find the skeletons of creatures that have alto- 
gether died out, experiments life did not con- 
tinue. The huge Dinosaurs, with their unwieldy 
bodies and their paltry brains, have their parallels 
in the religious history of men. Where are the 
vast experiments in religion that Babylonia 



182 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

made ? Their remains are buried in the Jewish 
Scriptures — that is practically all. Where are 
the Olympian Deities — except for poets, the 
natural custodians of the relics of dead Gods ? 
There is a law in these matters, I am sure. 
There is continuity and there are differences ; 
and some of the religious differences that emerge 
perish like the Dinosaurs ; some go on, changing 
creatively as they go, as the creatures did whose 
races are continued in our own, and whose vital 
habits we share in one degree or another as our 
biological inheritance. 

What shall I say about the greatest religious 
experiment the world has ever known, the most 
vital, the most inclusive, the farthest reaching, 
the profoundest ? What shall I say of the 
Christian Church when I think of the dead reli- 
gions of the past and the dying religions of the 
present ? 

I have been very seriously considering these 
questions, which are burning among Christians 
just now. (That in itself is an encouragement to 
hope, let me say in passing.) Both resolve them- 
selves into another. Is the state of the Church 
of a kind to obstruct the current of spiritual and 
religious life as the unwieldiness of some beasts 
and the protective armour of others obstructed 
the current of animal life ? Or is it ready to pass 



THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCH 183 

into the next real difference in the continuity of 
life that shall lift it up closer to its Lord ? 

The parallel between the biological and 
spiritual manners of life gives a sort of line of 
direction to my mind as I consider these ques- 
tions. 

Undoubtedly the Church is both unwieldy and 
wanting in flexibility. " He goeth back that con- 
tinueth not/' And because the Church has not 
continued in the flexibility of the first Fellowship 
and its ready receptiveness of inspiration, it has 
often gone back. There is no standing still for 
an association of live men, any more than there 
is for the live men themselves. Life, unques- 
tionably, is always moving. But the Church has 
often tried to stand still. From lofty motives 
sometimes ; from very base ones sometimes 
Rosmini's Five Wounds of the Church is bitter 
reading. And when I say Church I include every 
mode of the Church, although I naturally think 
most often in this connexion of that of a good 
half or more (I think it is) of the Christians of the 
world. That Church shows now, more clearly 
than any, the result of putting on a carapace of 
defensive armour. In this respect it invites 
disaster. Will disaster come ? There are signs 
of it ; but there have been signs before and they 
have passed. Yet the signs now are many and 



1 84 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

easily seen. Will they too pass ? Will the great 
Church recover the ground it has already lost 
in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain ? 
Can it arrest the increase of loss ? 

There is an inevitableness about the advance 
of scientific knowledge in the civilized world that 
bodes ill for any power that sets itself against 
it. And in spite of the protests of Rome that 
science is not being interfered with, we can see 
that it is usually only physical science that is 
free, and sometimes a cautious biology. His- 
torical science is not free ; it is opposed. Literary 
criticism is opposed. And this because both a 
scientific history and the critical examination of 
documents are fatal to the present claims of 
Rome. If we could look forward a hundred 
years, what should we see at Rome ? If we could 
look forward five hundred, I for one have no 
doubt whatever that we should see those claims 
no more. And their abandonment may come 
far more swiftly than past history would bid us 
hope. The Spirit of Christ has great reserves of 
power and pleading. The Saints and the 
Prophets of the Church are not at an end of 
their resources ; and they will have successors. 
Harnack says that Rome has produced saints in 
all ages, " so far as men can be so-called/' and 
it is producing them to-day. " Ecclesiasticism 



THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCH 185 

has not availed to suppress the power of the 
Gospel, which, in spite of the frightful weight 
that it has to carry, makes its way again and 
again." In Germany and elsewhere, he goes on, 
the Roman Church " has proved that it not only 
carries grains of gold, but that they are bound 
up with it and have been further developed in 
it." 

I fear that freedom for the Gospel, and for the 
Spirit that communicates new life, has not 
increased at Eome since Harnack wrote ; and 
therefore I fear that it has decreased. Yet we 
must not forget that there are principles of free- 
dom and of an open door for recognized inspira- 
tion that are official and sometimes officially 
acknowledged there. It was the great ruler, 
Innocent III, who pronounced definitely in 
favour of the supremacy of conscience over 
ecclesiastical authority ; and his pronouncement 
is embodied in the Decretals. He said that if a 
Christian is sure in his own mind that to do or 
leave undone this or that would be a deadly sin, 
he must even put up with being excommunicated 
rather than yield to condemnation by authority ; 
for the Church may condemn where God approves. 
And this is an established principle of the Church, 
not the obiter dictum of any one man, even 
though he was Pope. 



186 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

All depends, it seems to me, on a new and 
practical recognition of the constant presence 
and constant working of the Spirit, both outside 
and inside the Church, and of the equally con- 
stant errors, especially self-guarding errors, of 
men, whether as individuals or in a body. If 
these things are honestly confessed and acted 
upon, the next real difference of religious advance, 
the next rise in order for the Church of Christ in 
general may be at hand. And that again means 
a new Pentecost in a new fullness of time. We 
cannot do without the Church ; religious man 
finds himself stunted in growth, narrowed in out- 
look, liable to crazes and delusions, unless he is 
one of a true fellowship. It is a law of our being 
that we are nothing of ourselves and by our- 
selves, but grow to be something only by the 
interplay of social life. And the more we recog- 
nize the failure of the Church thd more acutely 
we realize our need of a new Pentecostal per- 
meation of it by the Spirit of Christ. 

There will be many trials for us all before we 
have made ready for so great a gift. The Church 
of England will have to suffer not only for the 
sins and ignorances of the rest but for its own. 
We have our superstitions, our false Gods ; 
there are in us insincerities, there are lies, around 
all of which affections and hope and faith have 



THE COMING KINGDOM 187 

gathered. We shall have to bear our part in the 
penalty the whole Church must pay for officially 
entertaining these things, for the abiding lies in 
its ecclesiastical soul — a penalty, perhaps of 
darkness and weariness, of doubt and feebleness. 
" This," Father Tyrrell said, " is the natural 
penalty of lying, that the road back to Truth 
leads through a weary desert of ignorance and 
uncertainty. We must be houseless in the 
interval between the pulling-down and the build- 
ing up. If man crucifies Truth, Truth must 
crucify man — magna est et praevalebit. But in 
cruce salus, only through that crucifixion can 
man be saved and reach the Truth — per crucem 
ad luceni." 

Perhaps we should not use such poignant lan- 
guage as he did, for in our Church we have no 
such poignant experience. But we shall not 
wholly escape what he foresaw for Rome. 



April 20th. — We look to the growth of fellow- 
ship among us as that which shall bear telling 
witness to the kingdom of heaven, the divine 
reality in men that Jesus showed and taught. 
Nothing else will serve that sovran purpose of 
the Lord, and every advance in fellowship is a 



1 88 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

step in its fulfilling. Union among men, true 
spiritual union, is the outward expression of 
their union with God in Christ and of their 
elevation to the rank of eternal life. It shows 
divine love and divine life become their own. 

We have a right to look to the Church to alter 
its ways, to lead us into fellowship and teach us 
the power and the beautiful arts of love. That 
way lies our salvation. Again, nothing else, 
nothing less, will serve. Salvation is of love, 
because God is love. Individual men find the 
beginnings of their salvation in God, but it is 
maimed and stunted without the salvation of 
their fellow-men. Christ, it is said, though 
perfect is not complete until ail men share him, 
until every living soul of man says " Not I, but 
he liveth in me/' So it is no wonder that salva- 
tion now is both incomplete and imperfect, for 
every one of us who have found it. I suppose 
that, like Christ, it will be complete only when 
all are completed. 

However this may be, the great truth to be 
considered by us now is that without union with 
other men we cannot be one with God. No 
doubt there may be and is and always has been 
a hidden union of spirits far wider and closer 
than any of which we are consciously aware. 
But there must be something else too, or at least 



THE COMING KINGDOM 189 

we must be straining- always after something 
else, if the kingdom of God is to be manifest 
among us. There have been attempts to identify 
the Catholic Church with the kingdom of God. 
Facts have made them abortive.' Either you 
must degrade the kingdom into one of this 
world, or you must ignore facts, if that attempt 
is to be successful. And you cannot do either, 
long. 

The Christian Church is not the kingdom of 
God in earth "as it is in heaven." But I am 
persuaded by that prayer that it may be ; 
though my pen falters as I write down the words 
— it seems now so unlike. Nevertheless it may. 
That prayer means and promotes a coming of 
God, however slow. 

The greatest apostacy of the Church (it has 
been said) is its ceasing to look for that coming 
here, and its abandonment of the prospect of the 
kingdom to another world. To that disastrous 
change we may attribute a large part of its easy 
acquiescence in things as they are, socially, 
morally, religiously and theologically ; and its 
tolerance of invasion by the aims and habits of 
the worldly world. 

" There are Christians that place and desire all 
their happiness in another life, and there is 
another sort of Christians that desire happiness 



190 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

in this. . . . Xot the vain happiness of this world, 
falsely called happiness, truly vain : but the real 
joy and glory of the blessed, which consisteth in 
the enjoyment of the whole world in communion 
with God ; not this only, but the invisible and 
eternal, which they earnestly covet to enjoy 
immediately : for which reason they daily pray 
Thy Kingdom come, and travel towards it by 
learning Wisdom as fast as they can. Whether 
the first sort be Christians indeed, look you to 
that. Thev have much to sav for themselves. 
Yet certainly they that put oft felicity with long 
delays are to be much suspected. For it is against 
the nature of love and desire to defer. Xor can 
any reason be given why they should desire that 
last, and not now. If they say because God hath 
commanded them, that is false : for He ofiereth 
it now, now they are commanded to have their 
conversation in Heaven, now they may be full 
of joy and full of glory. Ye are not straitened in 
me, but in your own bowels. Those Christians 
that can defer their felicity may be contented 
with their ignorance." 

There is no hesitation about this man. We 
know perfectly well what he means when he asks 
us to " look to it " whether these Christians are 
Christians. But the Church, in abandoning to 
heaven the kingdom it prays for in earth, has 



THE COMING KINGDOM 191 

made room for them. It has set its goal so far 
away that eagerness to reach it of necessity dies 
down. " Let us obey the Church by all means/' 
some Churchmen say, " let us keep its rules and 
use its rites, let us accept and defend its Creed and 
its dogmas : but let us do nothing so quixotic 
and fanatical as to work for the coming here in 
earth of the heavenly kingdom, although we 
pray for it. We will maintain the authorized 
and authoritative status quo ; the rest is every 
man's private affair ; and the net of the Church 
holds bad and good. Besides, we are surrounded 
by men with whom we cannot share communion ; 
we must defend our citadel. They may be 
Christians, but they are not our fellow-Church- 
men. Who can guarantee either the integrity of 
our Church or the faith once delivered to the 
saints, if we open our guarding gates ? " 

So Christ is divided in the division of Chris- 
tians, and is made unwelcome in the world. 

I have no immediately practical suggestions 
to make, for that is not my business or according 
to my knowledge. It seems to me that if Christ's 
Spirit were victorious within the Church no man 
would ever be afraid that the things of God 
could be conquered by things not of God coming 
from without. Practical difficulties would melt 



192 CHRISTUNITT AND CHRIST 

away in a fervour of new life. Christians would 
awake, as it were, from a bad dream and wonder 
how they could ever have thought it true. 
" Christianity is the universal destiny of man- 
kind in the same way that civilization or liberty 
or knowledge is its universal destiny/' But it 
is this in no exclusive sense, only " as the fullest 
embodiment of that Spirit of Christ which is 
striving for utterance through all religions, how- 
ever uncouth or barbarous/' We must learn to 
present it thus officially to the world, according 
to the mind of Christ. 

" For love doth use us for a sound of song, 
And Love's meaning our life wields, 
Making our souls like syllables to throng 
His tunes of exultation." 



April 2lst. — Ckristus venit semper; he comes, 
he remains ; and we return to him, finding in 
him the God without whom we are ever restless, 
receiving in and through him the divine Spirit 
that transfigures our spirits to his likeness. 

There is a change in many of our thinkers that 
both marks and foreshadows a return to Christ. 
Just as the thinkers of the characteristic period 
of the nineteenth century marked a revolt against 



FINDING CHRIST 193 

the Christian religion among them, and fore- 
shadowed the revolt of the populace that we see 
now, so (I tell myself to my comfort) the thinkers 
of this day show and will hasten the inevitable 
return. I am confirmed in this opinion by some- 
thing I have just read in A Fragment on the 
Human Mind by that acute and learned writer, 
John Theodore Merz, which I shall allow myself 
to quote here. After noticing that " all begin- 
nings of social and moral order, as likewise its 
restoration when seriously endangered, can be 
traced to the rise and influence of great Person- 
alities/' he goes on to say that " more than any 
other event in history have the simple yet 
mysterious beginnings of the Christian dispensa- 
tion succeeded in raising to the high level of a 
great Reality those ideals of a moral and spiritual 
life which in many varied forms appeared in the 
pre-Christian civilizations without being able to 
establish themselves as a great world-power." 

" The whole of modern History," he continues, 
" has been influenced by the dominating force 
of this great structure of Christian thought and 
Christian life. It was subjected to the most 
virulent attacks in the earlier centuries of our 
era, and to relentless criticism in more recent 
times ; it has not fallen ; but steadily gained 
ground. It has been misused and perverted as 



194 CHRIST I AN ITT AND CHRIST 

an instrument for gaining and extending purely 
worldly interests ; it has not lost its inherent and 
fundamental Spirituality. ... It has been de- 
nounced as antiquated and superseded : it has 
always reasserted itself again." 

There is indeed something in the Christian 
religion which endures, holding its own against 
both internal perversion and external attack. 
" The gates of hell " do not prevail against it. 
nor does treachery undo it. And Merz has noted, 
in his profound and wide-ranging survey of 
human thought, that although in science and 
philosophy change, through the increase of know- 
ledge, is always taking place, yet. as he says. 
f ' this change and development does not seem 
to apply in the same way to moral and religions 
questions. Notably " [he emphasizes]. " the 
Christian doctrine has not changed in the course 
of its life from the simple statements and in- 
junctions contained in its original records. Its 
history shows a repeated return to these original. 
doctrinal and historical statements, and it is 
only in their application to practical purposes 
that a greater realization is demanded and 
possible. " 

Obviously Merz means, by the " simple state- 
ments and injunctions '" contained in the Gospel, 
the Gospel data on which theologians reflect. 



FINDING CHRIST 195 

and from which they derive some part of their 
doctrine ; he does not mean that doctrine itself. 
These " original, doctrinal and historical state- 
ments," and " simple statements and injunc- 
tions " are very different from the complicated 
teaching of the Schools, and are permanent 
treasures of the whole Christian Church. We 
never pass beyond them, but we are always 
learning to realize them more fully in their 
meaning for us and their application to our 
lives. We never fathom their depth or exhaust 
their pertinence. Jesus Christ endures there, a 
lasting figure in history. We can see him 
through the eyes of his followers, watch his 
impress being stamped on them, discover what 
he made them to become. 

" I am the Way," he says. It is altogether 
wonderful, this Christian Way, as we study it in 
our records and know it in ourselves. Its secret 
is Love, the Love God is. And love is not only 
the way of our salvation but the physician for all 
our diseases, the healer of our wounds. There is 
no other. " Nothing better," Merz says, " has 
been said on this subject of the supreme rule of 
life than has been said in the Gospel of Love." 

We must return to that Gospel and study it 
afresh, always afresh. And we must welcome 
every sign of the return, even when men do not 



196 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

know they are giving it. When we hear some of 
them say that men need, or of necessity must 
have, industrial cooperation and a League of 
brotherhood among nations ; and others saying 
that we need a new Fellowship in the Church 
that shall expand the principle of the Koinonia 
of the first followers of Christ, we must tell our- 
selves that they are awaking to the sense of 
their failure without him. Blindly and foolishly 
experimental in self-seeking, they have tried one 
way after another and have found that each led 
to more or less of ruin ; that none proved itself 
a way of more and better life ; in short, that he 
who would save his life must lose it. When the 
loss was " only/' as some of the experimenters 
might say, spiritual, they might ignore it, drown- 
ing spiritual care in the strong drink of material 
prosperity ; but now that the loss is material, 
now that prosperity is everywhere threatened 
and in many places destroyed, and war of all 
varieties stands convicted even at the bar of 
prudence, there is a new witness to the true 
meaning of life, a new schoolmaster leading men 
to reconsider Christ. At least we can say that 
the doctrines of Antichrist have been discredited 
by their practical results. The fruits of an evil 
tree have declared its quality. 
I wonder how all this will work out. It is not 



FINDING CHRIST 197 

possible to believe in the discovery of Christ and 
in a welcome given to his searching Spirit, merely 
because both are profitable. No man is able to 
save life and win life in Christ from motives of 
self-interest. The way of the eternal life that 
Christ is and gives is no broad road of common 
sense and an enlightened self-interest. Self- 
interest is always dull and blind. It is also in its 
dull, blind manner, inventive for self alone ; and 
its roads, even when they are new and seem to 
be made to the pattern of those in the kingdom 
of heaven, are not heavenly roads. There are 
many ways of just missing Christ as there are of 
finding him ; and the missing is a matter of self- 
interest. You cannot love through self-interest, 
although you can, after a fashion, copy the 
manners^of love. And therein is the gist of the 
thing that we are just now planning to attempt. 
Is it to be the real thing or an imitation ? 

Yet I am glad and thankful that at least old 
theoretical notions have vanished for many of us, 
destroyed in the Great Wars of nations and classes 
and of commercial aims and practices. That 
is indeed a gain. And, after all, the history of 
the rise of mankind is marked throughout by 
stages in the discovery of good through the trial 
of evil. " How shall a man find his way unless 
he lose it ? 3: The first family, the first tribe 



198 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

and the first nation owed their existence to self- 
interest ; yet they have all taught us of love, 
and, if we had not been so stupid, would have 
taught us more and saved us many of the rough 
lessons in love by which we may have to learn 
now. By trial and error, then, we who refuse 
to discover God in other ways, must slowly come 
to see that at least we cannot invent a better 
way than his. 

Undoubtedly, too, philosophers and scientific 
men, thinkers, their ideas, influence the body 
politic far more deeply and thoroughly than the 
body politic knows. "Prevailing studies/' 
Berkeley says, " are of no small consequence to 
a State, the religion, manners, and civil Govern- 
ment of a country ever taking some bias from its 
philosophy, which affects not only the minds of 
its professors and students, but also the opinions 
of all the better sort and the practice of the 
whole people remotely." May be, the war with 
Germany has shown us that Berkeley is justified 
by present facts. You have only to read Houston 
Chamberlain on The Foundations of the Nine- 
teenth Century, or Treitschke, to see how the 
mechanistic biology affected the political out- 
look, and thence came to be expressed in the 
ruinous conflict of the twentieth century. And 
since biology is no longer mechanistic its influence 



THE SUPREME PERSON 199 

will be radically different. So thought and 
practical experience will work, we may dare to 
hope, together, in preparing us to open our 
minds, at least, if not our hearts, to receive the 
Gospel of new life, more life, greater life, won 
through love and service, in place of the mocking 
tale of a conquest of it by dominance and force 
and greed. 

# # * 

April 23rd. — Samuel Butler says that " the 
development of all new religions follows much 
the same general course. In all cases the times 
are more or less out of joint — older faiths are 
losing their hold upon the masses." And you 
have only to find " a personality strong in itself, 
and made to seem still stronger by association 
with some transcendent miracle," to have your 
" new " religion. I quarrel with that word 
" new " but not seriously with anything else. 
Every religion has its alliance with religions of 
the past. I would say that religions change, 
and some die ; but that none is altogether new. 
Sir James Frazer will show that clearly, if no 
one else does. But on the whole Butler is right. 
And because our own times are badly out of 
joint and the Christian Faith, in the fashion in 
which is has been popularly understood, is losing 



200 CHRISTIJNITT AND CHRIST 

or has lost its hold upon the masses, there is only 
one chance for religion among us if the signs of 
past history are worth anything as guides to the 
time to come. A great personality, a tran- 
scendent miracle not only possible but actual — 
and men will be attracted, and will discover 
religion, whether for the first time or once again. 

Must we be anxious, then, about the religion 
of Christ ? Are we to fear that the gates not of 
hell but of heaven will prevail against it ? Must 
we look for another great personality to super- 
sede Christ Jesus ? 

Some would answer " yes " to these questions. 
But I am certain that they have never known 
Christ. They have never drunk of his fountain 
of living water nor seen his beauty. They have 
not tried to exhaust him and failed ; they have 
not found in their own experience that he is 
" new every morning/' Those who have known 
him discover that as they grow in their " wisdom 
and stature " he grows ; and that when they 
look back on their outgrown selves they see a 
Christ who was then all-sufficing, but is now 
outgrown too. 

The Christian religion has always at hand a 
new great personality for its revivifying ; and the 
miracle accompanying that personality never 
ceases. It grows with our growth and with his 



"THE SUPREME PERSON 201 

growth in us ; and for us also, as our vision of 
him opens out. 

Of no other religion, that is, of no other manner 
of religion, can this be truly said. And because 
it can be truly said of the Christian religion we 
are entitled to our Christian confidence. " There 
is something true and divinely revealed " (I 
think it was Newman who said so, and I quote 
from memory) " in every religion upon earth " ; 
but none has for its originator and inspirer One 
for whom we may justly claim that he is tho 
only way of eternal life for every man of every 
race and every time ; One whose promise to be 
always with men has been kept in the letter as 
well as in the Spirit, — a personality both eternal 
and historical, to be seen and heard in Palestine 
across the centuries, " touched, tasted and 
handled " there, as well as known by his Spirit 
ever being given into the spirits of men. " There 
is but one salvation for all mankind, and that is 
the Life of God in the soul." This life, we say, 
is the eternal, universal Christ's. It is Christ 
who enlightens " every man that cometh into 
the world," with the divine light in which all 
men may find the divine life. " The Spirit of 
the Lord filleth the whole round world." 

I go back in memory to those books on the life 
of our Lord Jesus Christ which I was reading 



2C2 CHRISTIJXITT AND CHRIST 

when I began these diary notes ; I think of the 
many " Lives M of him that have been written 
and the many more that doubtless will be written; 
I think, too, of the innumerable moments in 
which men have rediscovered him in new loveli- 
ness and power, and found him fillin g them with 
new light, new love, new life, and seeming to 
them newly glorified in a glory of God and man 
not seen before. And then fear drops away 
from me. unfaith too. " Back to Christ as our 
fathers saw him ! " is not my cry ; what I would 
cry aloud, if I could make myself heard, is 
" Onward to Christ as no one has seen him yet ! - J 
He awaits us. he calls us ; he is lifted up once 
more ; and now as before he would draw all men 
to him. 

" Hearken to me. ye children of the Immortal, 
dwellers of the heavenly worlds. I have known 
the Supreme Person who comes as light from the 
dark beyond.'"'' That is what every Christian 
man should say to any man who thinks that the 
world needs a new personality to revive religion 
for it. We know the Supreme Person. "'"' the 
Beauty old as new." 

When a great artist has painted for us some 
landscape with which we had thought ourselves 
familiar, and we see it after drinking in his 
revelation of it. do we not see everything in that 



CONCLUSION 203 

moor and stream, that hillside under the cloud- 
flecked sky, transfigured ? So it is with the 
sublime artistry of Christ. He transfigures lives, 
knowledge, experience, our whole world outlook ; 
and he transfigures himself. As we share his 
Spirit we find him ever different though the 
same, Beauty indeed, and though old yet new ; 
and we see all things through " eyes of God " 
we never had before. 

In our deepest social and personal unrest, in 
the worst days that have come or are to come 
upon the Christian religion, there may be heard 
the summons to us to arise and go to him, that 
he may show us what he is now, now in our 
latest need. We alone among men of religion the 
world over are gloriously aware that we have at 
hand our potent Supreme Person, with his ever 
authentic human miracle of more life and in 
abundance. What he does is his witness and the 
proof of his enduring supremacy ; what he is, 
no man knows until he finds him for himself, 
and every man may unceasingly know afresh. 
" Before Abraham was, i" am." 

I see that my diary need not be carried further. 
Just as the testing of my religion in my old 
diary led me to realize more of what Christ means ; 
so the terrible searching of the years from 1914 



20 4 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRIST 

until now has done me the same service. I have 
seen the failure of organized religion as it is, of 
the Church in all its modes and moods as it is ; 
but I have realized as I never did before the un- 
shaken foundation of our Christian Faith and 
the power of Christ to revive our dead bones. 
It comes to this for me : The continuity of the 
life-process demands of Churches and of men a 
rising from one order of life to another. Man is 
still life's open way of advance, as he was when 
his great brain was being shaped out, that 
indefinitely flexible instrument for a personal 
being's use. And his indefinitely flexible social 
instruments, Churches, States and so forth, keep 
open his way of community before him. If he 
does not travel in the way of life he goes back. 
History shows it, experience proves it. Animals 
may remain mere eddies of restricted lives turn- 
ing round and round in a well-beaten track ; but 
animals that have become persons may not, on 
pain of losing all personal values of life and for- 
feiting the destiny it holds for them. They are 
vitally incomplete as no mere animal is. " It is 
of the nobility of man's soul that he is in- 
satiable." f Wants are the bands and cements 
between God and us." 

So I recognize the firm foundation of the 
Christian Faith in our nature, and the in- 



CONCLUSION 205 

estimable, the everlasting, the temporal and the 
eternal value of Christ for our nature and our 
faith. We win new life and pass to growth in its 
eternal order only as his Spirit of life penetrates 
our spirits and communicates his life. To that 
winning I see no end, because eternal life has no 
end, nor has God. And the whole process means 
for me spiritual and personal advance in union 
with God and with all who are his. We became 
" capable of God " when we became true men. 
Thenceforth our biological advance, in the strict 
sense of the term, was in his company, our 
biological failure in the loss of it. " II parait 
juste de voir dans la vie le trait d'union de la 
science et de la religion." 

jg^To write this little book has been for me a 
work that will abide with me, I think, to the end 
of my days on earth. It is a great matter to see 
as never before the mission of Christ, and his 
power as life-giver to the world. I hope I have 
overcome once for all the temptation to doubt of 
the future of his religion as it will come to be 
expressed in the Christian Church, however cer- 
tain I may be of the inadequacy of its expression 
now. 

That these scattered and more or less dis- 
connected notes may suggest to some readers a 



206 CL RISTIANHT AND CHRIST 

remedy for their own doubts and fears seems to 
me now a great part of my justification for writing 
them. But, as I have said, they have done me 
good. And I can assure any reader (and how- 
ever critical he may be I hope he will believe me), 
that the book is a genuine record of my feelings 
and my thoughts as I was writing. It is not a 
literary trade-product; it has come in all 
possible frankness from my heart and mind. 



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